Lost in the city
“The natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote late in his decline, when that “qualified” could sound both wise and utterly defeated. In “Happiness,” her fifth book and fourth novel, Aminatta Forna considers a distinguished man who’s witnessed and endured incredible suffering and emerged without much time for such irony or self-pity.
Forna, a Scottish former BBC reporter, has previously written about the long aftermath of war and atrocity, particularly in the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone. In “Happiness,” one of her two central characters, Attila Asare, an accomplished Ghanaian psychiatrist, has worked in both of those conflicts, and several others. Awestruck students quote back to him his papers on “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Non-Combatant Populations” and “Misdiagnosis of Schizophrenia in Refugee and Immigrant Populations.” Gentle and reserved, Attila has nonetheless seen the most desperate moments and places of the past 30 years.
For most of “Happiness,” however, we are in London, during a wintry week in 2014 in which Attila is set to deliver the keynote at a psychiatry conference and indulge in some theater and fine dining. This respite from his research is quickly interrupted when his niece’s young son, Tano, goes missing in the city’s frigid streets. Simultaneously, Attila is confronted with a former lover’s rapid decline into early dementia and becomes involved, as an expert witness, in the case of a Sierra Leonean woman who’s committed arson after the death of her husband, with whom Attila coincidentally worked.
Interspersed with these trials are flashbacks to Attila negotiating with an arrogant militia commander, conducting a nerve-fraying hostage release, and mourning the sudden loss of his wife. He navigates his hellish week with a composure reminiscent of Henry Perowne, the preternaturally rational neurosurgeon in Ian McEwan’s “Saturday.” But Perowne wouldn’t have lasted past Attila’s Wednesday, and he, at least, managed to squeeze in a game of squash.
Attila, however, is only half of “Happiness.” We also follow Jean, an American transplant studying the proliferation of foxes in London. Through another series of coincidences, she meets and re-meets Attila and helps in his search for the young Tano. Several appealing secondary characters, all from African and Eastern European diasporas, are also pulled into the effort. Away from Attila and the group, Jean tangles with animal poachers and appears on a radio call-in program, during which she’s lambasted for taking the side of the “nuisance foxes.”
“Happiness” takes pains to connect its two halves — a treatise on changing city habitats with an intimate exploration of war, trauma and the ways in which migrant communities sustain themselves. During the group’s search for Tano, Jean says, “‘Foxes stake out an area and then they stay in it . ... The boy is no different, he’s going to stay where he feels most secure.” Elsewhere, Forna advances notions about the adaptability of those forced to find new homes: “Tano’s brain was an ecosystem, it would reconfigure itself to survive.” While more ecologically minded readers may feel otherwise, the fox material seems a touch strained to me, and Jean’s storylines a little static.
Adding to this, Forna’s prose stays fairly measured, and the pile-up of coincidences puts hairline cracks in the fictional illusion. “Happiness” glances at the latter early on, when Attila declares that “what we call coincidences are merely normal events of low probability,” a passage indicative of the novel’s tendency toward elegantly discoursing on its subjects in lieu of fully dramatizing them.
Still, the book refinds its center of gravity when it returns to Attila, and his private sadness — he likes to tango with an imaginary partner in his lonely hotel rooms — generates considerable sympathy. The doctor’s unflappability does mute the impact of some episodes, including the search for Tano. Though I appreciated that Forna didn’t present this material as other writers might — with trembling outrage over the fate of a defenseless child — I occasionally longed for Attila to let loose his fear and frustration.
At the same time, the novel speaks back to this desire for catharsis. Its title is a feint: When we finally arrive at the keynote, Attila speaks in favor of resilience over comfort or contentment. “How do we become human,” he argues, “except in the face of adversity?” We’re reminded that there are places in the world where even “qualified unhappiness” can be a luxury. Though it remains a little elusive, a little fox-like, Forna’s latest is crammed with both big, intriguing ideas and strong, quiet ambition.
Will Boast is the author of a story collection, “Power Ballads”; a memoir, “Epilogue”; and a novel, “Daphne,” published this year by Liveright/Norton. Email: books@sfchronicle.com