A marriage plot for an age when marriage means little
Three years into their relationship, the 20- something Dubliners Celine and Luke still “did not, as a rule, ‘ share feelings.’” Celine’s “family never taught her how,” so she measures the partnership by the clutter they’ve accumulated together — it would be so hard to undo. “Marriage will never happen between us,” Luke says to her as they lie in bed after a party. “And that’s not a problem necessarily. It would be silly to stop when it’s going well. But we’re not going to end up together.” One page later, he proposes.
Naoise Dolan’s second novel, “The Happy Couple,” is a study not of love or romance but of the motivating force of self- delusion. When Luke is nowhere to be found at their engagement party, Celine tells herself, “Things are fine, fine, fine.” When he does turn up, there is something “safe” about Luke’s voice, even when she knows he’s lying to her. “What mattered was their potential,” she says, not the “tightness in Celine’s chest.” From Luke, “she wanted nothing, really; hardly anything; just to be known”; what she seeks in marriage is a comforting boundary of self- definition.
“The Happy Couple” hews to the usual contours of what we now call a millennial novel: People in their mid- to- late 20s, mired in indecision and a gloomy sense of p o s s i bi l - ity, walk at sunrise after a night of cocaine and ask one another things like, “Do you think I could be happy?” Dolan smirks at the persistence of the question in a social milieu — Celine is a professional pianist, Luke does communications for a tech company — with infinite options for fulfillment ( both Celine’s and Luke’s romantic entanglements involve multiple genders and little judgment). A supporting cast fills out the millennialnovel universe: Celine’s sister has “only the usual signs of wear: mild nutritional deficiencies, self- diagnosed anxious attachment style, self- diagnosed avoidant attachment style, stiff neck from excessive phone use”; and her ex- girlfriend Maria learns in therapy that “I’m not responsible for how people treat me.”
All the def lection of agency and commitment becomes a bit glib. “It was the very act of choosing that Luke couldn’t stand, and if he ever accidentally made a choice, he’d promptly do something to unchoose it,” Dolan writes. In one of many epistolarystyle inserts of drafted groom’s speeches, Luke waxes nostalgic for an ex with whom he “play- acted a different relationship each night,” and “these ersatz partnerships were far more fun than the real one we’d attempted.” More focused on their self- narrated “arc” than they are on their actual lives and the people in them, Dolan’s characters may have far more freedom than Jane Austen’s, but it doesn’t mean they’re any happier.
The head- on consideration of marriage forces a certain heavy- handedness on the novel; Dolan seems to have felt obliged to smuggle in bromides about “the system,” “heteronormativity” and “patriarchy,” as well as cursory revelations like “nobody knew anyone, not fully,” and “love is letting people hurt you.” The most profound confession Luke arrives at is: “Honestly I’m not great at knowing what I want.”
Why bother with the centuries- old marriage plot in a no- stakes, nostringsattached world of total freedom to change one’s mind without consequence? Still, we may always need the device. “Marriage affords great collective excitations,” Roland Barthes wrote. “If we managed to suppress the Oedipus complex and marriage, what would be left for us to tell?”