Story of Irish village helps you slow down

This is Happiness

Niall Williams Bloomsbury

The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. Escaping into the pages of This is Happiness feels as much like time travel as enlightenment.

Although it takes place in the late 1950s, the story feels bathed in sepia tones. Electricity has not yet come to the rainy parish of Faha in County Clare, where This is Happiness is set. Proudly uninterested in the modern conveniences that other towns enjoy, these people work, instead, by the glow of lamps and moon.

But that is about to change when 17-year-old Noe Crowe arrives from Dublin. He’s been sent to Faha to stay with his grandparents. Haunted by the death of his mother, Noe has withdrawn from the seminary, “not exactly in disgrace,” he says, but terrified he might never “discover what it meant to live a fully human life.”

The irony here is that Faha is of no consequence whatsoever. “If you could find it, you’d be on your way somewhere else,” Noe says. But at just the right point in his life, when his spirit is raw for affection, this little village offers Noe the sanctuary he needs.

If Faha isn’t for everybody, then neither, frankly, is Williams’s novel, delivered in the pensive voice of a man in his 70s recalling his youth. If you’re in a hurry, hurry along to another book. Noe’s narrative walks along a cow path of anecdotes about the fiercely private, yet comically nosy people in his grandparents’ village.

What matters to the people of Faha — and, clearly, to Williams — are the insights that transcend details. It’s here, living among these strange folk, that Noe first realizes that “contrary to science, the heart expands more than it contracts.”

The sweetness of this novel would curdle if it weren’t preserved by a tincture of tragedy that runs through so many of these lives. For all Noe’s goofiness, he’s a young man scarred early by grief, which may account for his precocious sympathy.

If you’re a reader of a certain frame of mind, craving a novel of delicate wit laced with rare wisdom, this, truly, is happiness.