How do you gauge happiness?
James Wood’s ‘Upstate’ explores a family dealing with their mental health
James Wood’s second novel, which chugs into the station fifteen years after his debut, The
Book Against God (he’s been busy), is a quiet anti-epic firmly in the realist mould; no surprise, given Wood’s consistent elevation of the latter via his columns as book critic at The
New Yorker and his several works of criticism, including 2008’s How Fiction Works.
Set in 2007, with Obama still a freshman on the national scene, Upstate takes place over six days, during which 68-yearold Alan Querry, a property developer with working-class roots from northern England, comes to visit his daughter, Vanessa, a philosophy professor living in Saratoga Springs, NY (the “upstate” of the title). Joining them, too, is Vanessa’s younger sister, Helen, a successful music executive at Sony in London — alarm bells having been raised about Vanessa’s mental health by her American boyfriend, Josh, whom they’ve never met.
Backstories and personalities are steadily etched in. We learn that Alan and the girls’ mother had an acrimonious divorce stemming from an affair (hers) and that she died twelve years ago. As the introverted academ- ic, Vanessa is the temperamental opposite to Helen and Alan, both of whom happen to be in the midst of professional crises. Helen, eager to leave Sony, suggests Alan might invest in her start-up idea: she’s convinced (presciently!) that music’s future will be about borrowing, not owning.
Alan, currently suffering the fallout of some poor investment decisions, is eager to help, but when he hesitates, Helen immediately takes umbrage.
Conversations revolve around observed differences between Britain and America. Wood uses imagery perceptively and often wittily (Vanessa in love is “a cat drowning in cream”), and spends what feels like a bit too long describing snow in its various states — falling, melting, reflecting.
Vanessa’s crisis, which had stemmed from Josh’s commitment problems, now seems to be in remission. But despite her claims that all’s well, Helen and Alan are alert to subtle indications that Josh, outwardly amiable, remains a flight risk; Vanessa, with her history of depression, unknowingly fragile. Shortly before leaving, Alan goes to one of her philosophy lectures and feels both pride and reassurance in her sparkling competence.
Upstate is solid and enjoyable, if not earth-shaking. It has the feel and arc of a short story, and might well have packed more of a punch had it been written as one.
But the questions it raises also feel unusually resonant in the wake of the recent high-profile suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain; namely, how to gauge another person’s happiness, especially when despair can so easily lurk behind the scrim of professional success. And that sense of invisible urging — to think about how we connect as humans — is very much how fiction should work.