Book Notes: I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder

This is the novel of the year that I referred to earlier. It’s very, very good, my friends. You need to read it.

I Want You To Be Happy is a novel about modern dating. I’m very grateful to Calder that he didn’t make it about dating apps. It would be very easy, but a total cop-out, to make it about the apps. Apps are nothing. It’s our understanding of the purpose of dating that is creating Mariana-Trench-like depths of unhappiness. People in their 20s and 30s are unhappy in their personal lives because their understanding of what those lives are supposed to be about is completely messed up.

In the novel, Chuck, a 35-year-old copywriter in London, breaks off a 12-year engagement to his fiancée because it is getting in the way of his freedom. Because freedom is the most important thing, right? Once the fiancée is gone, Chuck is free to drink himself into a stupor, take drugs, have bad sex with random strangers, and sabotage his career because making an effort at a job seems pointless.

Chuck meets Joey, a 23-year-old barista who sees in him a hope finally of attaching herself to somebody older, wealthier, and more stable. Joey wants to bake cookies for a husband in a house they share, and not to be passed down from one indifferent dude to another. But Joey knows she can’t say that. She knows that after months of servicing Chuck sexually and putting up with his drunken outbursts, she has to pretend that, of course, they don’t have a relationship. Because a relationship is a status conferred upon you for good behavior at some far away point in the future. Then, after a 12-year engagement, you can be discarded in favor of a newer, shinier, still hopeful woman.

The setup where a relationship is not a relationship and people pretend that what they want is not attachment, devotion, and family, but “to have a good time” with a succession of random people who can’t lay any claim to them isn’t making anybody happy. Chuck and Joey keep insisting that they are having a very good time, but their lives look exceptionally miserable.

The writing is simple and unpretentious, which is done on purpose to highlight that Joey and Chuck are pretentious wannabe writers. They cling on to a fantasy of artistic relevance because that’s the only thing that excuses their aimless lives.

This is a very un-diverse novel that sticks to the point without meandering in unnecessary directions. The solution to the problem is not stated in the book, but it is so obvious that stating it feels superfluous. We must stop pretending that the goal of life is loosely defined fun. Instead, we should stop being shy about saying honestly that the most important life goal between the ages of 20 and 30 is to find a husband or a wife and start a family. Instead of the current bizarre situation where people who are pursuing that goal are shamed and humiliated by those who aren’t to the detriment of the entire society, we should have an exact opposite situation. Joey shouldn’t feel embarrassed for expecting attachment and commitment. It’s Chuck who is the weirdo in the situation. The shame should be his. I Want You To Be Happy makes this case very clearly.