Happy Now?

By Pico Iyer

No one, as Sally Farber, the protagonist of Lisa Grunwald's novel Whatever Makes You Happy (Random House; 238 pages), notes, quarrels about what anger means, or sadness, or envy. "But happiness is--it's--a shimmer." Farber, 40, has had no trouble writing books on The History of Anger, The History of Jealousy and even The History of Love, but she's hung up on writing the biography of happiness. Two kids running into the bedroom "like bright, sharp arrows," a "tidy, perfect, kitchen drawer" of a husband plus a book contract, and still, for Sally, happiness lies around the corner.

Farber decides early on that happiness is a matter of temperament, not circumstance. It "has less to do with what people have than with what they think they want," she says. After all, for much of history, happiness as an end in itself has been as strange a notion as suffering as an end in itself. Then why is happiness so much harder to access than simple depression?

A tale of a woman approaching middle age who doesn't know exactly what she wants (because she secretly knows that what she wants is irresponsibility) sounds like familiar stuff. But Grunwald tells the story with a wit--a bride wears an "expression of tranquilized charm"--that never quite conceals the sting of wisdom just below. Perhaps it's no surprise that by the end of her well-turned and winning tale, we see and feel, as Farber does, that the pursuit of happiness is really nothing more than a recipe for misery. --By Pico Iyer