‘I don’t know what could be higher’: debut author Jem Calder discovered by Sally Rooney | Fiction

Jem Calder’s writing career had a legendary beginning. Sally Rooney emailed him, impressed by a short story he submitted to a magazine he was editing shortly after Conversations with Our Friends. It was the first story he finished. Calder was already a “huge fan” of Rooney’s, so the whole thing was surreal, he tells me. “I can’t really imagine what would happen, to be honest.”

The story culminated in Reward System, Calder’s 2022 series of six interconnected fables following sad teenagers living in an unnamed city. He was praised as a year book; comments in this paper ranked Calder among “the most talented young writers in fiction today”. Now, his first book, I Want You to Be Happy, takes up some of the themes of the first book: the temptations of modern love, millennial ennui, consumer culture, technology, political and environmental destruction. And it already has some famous fans: David Szalay has sung its praises, while Andrew O’Hagan says Calder is his new “favourite author”.

At the opening of the novel, 23-year-old Joey meets 35-year-old Chuck at a bar. They sleep together, and what can only be described as hell begins: Joey falls hard, but Chuck can’t get over his ex-girlfriend. Joey seems to spend his life waiting for a text back. Like the Reward System, this book is simple and smart; His 34-year-old author’s sobering assessment of youth life today is on the money. But in all these books, the stone’s cynicism is offset by the earthy sense that something better is coming, and what it says can be surprisingly reassuring. It also helps that Calder is funny.

It soon becomes clear that Joey and Chuck are not singing from the same sheet of music. In today’s dating terms, Chuck can be classified as an “avoidant”: he left his girlfriend, and later regretted it; he likes being around Joey, but he doesn’t want to be and he. “She desperately wants a relationship, and she wants someone to take her away,” Calder says.

Chuck feels like it represents the commitment that Calder made to the “unsettled and uncomfortable” economic reality that plagued his generation. “You can’t afford to have a house, it’s too difficult to have a family” – things that were often “given in old relationships”. These barriers “appear at the emotional level” as avoidance, or being in casual rather than formal relationships. There is a hedonism to it: because there is “really no real hope for the future, the younger generation has to be content with arguing around”. But this “turns out to be a very shallow way of living your life” – a lesson that his characters “have to try and get their heads around”.

Although Joey’s world seems bright, Chuck is devastated. Calder says he is “disgusted” by Chuck’s types – men in their 30s or 40s who are “old for being meek”, suffering from some kind of depression or technical skills (maybe they were in a band and managed to do well) – often life has not turned out the way they thought it would. He said: “I always knew I was about to write another bad book so I wouldn’t be in that position.”

Calder grew up in Cambridge, studied English in Leeds, and has been working in a variety of jobs alongside writing, including his successors – Joey is a barista, and Chuck is a novelist. He says he “can’t relate” to writers who complain about writer’s block – working a day “gives me such motivation to come back and push myself to overcome the challenges I write”. The book, which took three years to write, alternates between Joey’s and Chuck’s thoughts. Both of them write on the side of their daily work, and this book is part of two types of literature that love each other, exchanging poems of Louise Glück and Frank O’Hara, showing their work to each other. Both are inspired by friendship, something Calder has experienced: he started writing the novel after he began dating his girlfriend, meaning he “could write some of the things that were in my head”.

Chuck and Joey’s powers (he’s big and rich) become even more interesting when we realize he’s the genius. I Want You to Be Happy is an extension of the opening story in Reward System, where a girl, Julia, meets her best friend. Both Joey and Julia “seem to have a purpose”, and both men “feel taken by this girl”, says Calder. These changes reflect the drama taking place in many fields, including the arts – older men feeling replaced by young, intelligent women. “It’s really funny to me, people are trying to deny what’s going on.”

Before he started writing, Calder wrote works of Elizabeth Taylor. “He’s probably my favorite writer,” she says – with “the heartbreak that breaks your heart at times, the brutality he can make you feel in a few lines”. Richard Yates was also a major influence on I Want You to Be Happy.

In the novel, the place is not clear, although Calder lets it slip that we are in east London (it’s a strange tenant – one person lives “in a warehouse with nine people and two toilets”). Similarly, they drop consumer products without mentioning them – “aspirational-brand handsoap”, “coral-colored” debit card – which has two effects on the reader: it is satisfying to look at the labels (Aesop, Monzo), until you realize that you are like Chuck and Joey.

Calder’s characters love instant gratification – shopping, social media, venting, pornography – anything to prevent the dangers of the world (at one point Chuck reads a Guardian article about the weather, which he “forgot to worry about today, but now”). Chuck can be described as an alcoholic, although one of the main questions in the book is what constitutes an addiction, now that addiction-like behavior is everywhere. “The chance of addiction is about to go down”, says Calder. It is “the current situation, to some extent”. And he knows his readers are struggling too, that he’s competing in an “uphill battle” against visuals.

Calder can be included in the group of young writers for whom the term “voice of a generation” can easily be applied, along with the likes of Rooney, Oisín McKenna, Madeleine Gray – writers concerned with the impact of the economic climate on the lives of young people. How does Calder feel about that badge? “It’s not something I’m actively pursuing,” he says. “It’s inevitable not to criticize capitalism in some way if you’re trying to deal with the absurdity of the way we live now, but I don’t care about putting my political views into my fiction anymore.