I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder review – love for the eternal people on the Internet | Fiction

THe opens the episode of I Want You to Be Happy with the perfect way to describe a man and woman who meet in a bar, try to discuss music and flirt in the dark. He confirms that he is 23 years old and that he is 35. All the facts – the name or location of the bar, the music, even the names of the family – have now been changed: “After a while, the twenty-three-year-old woman raised her voice and, referring to the thirty-five-year-old man, asked her friend with short hair: ‘How old do you think he is?’ His short-haired friend looked at the thirty-five-year-old man’s face; I thought for a while. ‘Forty?’ The twenty-three-year-old woman laughed. ‘He is thirty-five years old.’

Jem Calder, like his protagonists, is in danger. His short stories for 2022, Reward Systemhe was much loved; this first book has the honest and no-nonsense writing of the kind of Sally Rooney or Vincenzo Latronico, with a worldly interest that inspires Nicholson Baker or Bret Easton Ellis or an early Don DeLillo muttering under his breath. As this opening shows, these figures are, or can be, representative.

In some ways, they are. Not much happens. Boy meets girl. The girl has hope. The boy has a drinking problem. A boy and a girl are a little happy, so they are not happy. Tale already like time. But what is new in this book is the book’s real interest in the place where such a story is happening now. It’s all rental ebikes, vapes, protein shakes, Slack channels and push notifications. The characters communicate lightly, they complain about whether they respond quickly or slowly, and their age difference is dictated by their writing style (older Chuck uses capital letters and punctuation; younger Joey does not).

A passage like the following, for example, tells the reader everything but tells them little:

Walking home, he put on his headphones and played the new album of his favorite singer: the release of the album was announced via push notifications earlier in the day. The new album wasn’t as good as the singer-songwriter’s older ones – otherwise Joey wasn’t in the right mood – so he went to the singer-songwriter’s website and played his favorite songs. When listening to these popular songs, he would sing along with his breath, joining in on the lead or refrain that showed no effort.

The characters here live in and out of the world, and everything is so static that reality seems secondary. One of them jokes that cigarettes are drugs instead of vapes – they stole the gag on the meme they saw. At one point, what seems to me a very good touch: “In the morning he took a bath when he slept.

In such a world, who would want to create art? Basically, all our protagonists. Joey is a poet who works as a barista; Chuck is a writer who can be hired as a copywriter. Chuck’s ongoing project is called Paradigms and it’s as scary as the title suggests. The plot depends on it.

Calder’s visual style, if this isn’t contradictory, means that when he releases something visually appealing, you notice it. He prefers the noun to become a verb (“axised”, “pendulumed”, “elevator”), or the verb to disappear completely, and the odd Joycean portmanteau seems to emphasize that this style is a choice and not a sign of a limit: “Outside now, the night sky keeps the sky without light. plane”; “Old houses tucked away on farms, the sides facing the sun were bright pink.”

He’s good in the rain, too. We encounter, for example, “a low, perplexing rain that seemed to fall suddenly at mid-air and not from any higher source”. After that, Joey and his friends “waited for a weak, aerosol-like rain for 15 minutes”. And, perhaps best of all: “On his way home it rained the kind Joey always called ‘wet rain’.”

In some ways, at bottom, this is something warm and classic: a proper book. His followers have an inner life; their opinion is important to them, and to us. The turning and turning of the third person makes Calder carelessly explain the difference between the way they see each other and the way they see themselves, and look at their efforts to solve their people in the digital world that we now live. Men, you find yourself thinking: it’s hard for singles.