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- Title: A Way to Be Happy
- Author: Caroline Adderson
- Genre: Short-story collection
- Publisher: Biblioasis
- Pages: 240
Caroline Adderson may have titled her latest book A Way to Be Happy, but the stories within seldom take the clearest path. Most of them see characters poorly navigating myriad misfortunes and difficulties, and only one, Homing, might have what is conventionally understood as a happy ending.
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Homing takes flight from a Susan Orlean story first published in 2006, about the difficulties of giving away pigeons that have been trained to return to the same spot. Adderson’s fictional interventions into the theme have the birds coming home to roost upon the rented roof of a middle-aged woman whose marriage did not survive the 2020 pandemic; the story begins in “part two,” after Marta has left her husband and travelled hundreds of miles to a smaller city only to be met with a different form of terrible loneliness: “She’d come here to face her solitude. That was her purpose after 28 years of marriage. … However, if part two of her life was always going to be like this, she already knew she’d need a part three.”
Part three, of course, arrives with the thunderous swell of hundreds of pigeon wings. Adderson introduces them with a winking Hitchcockian menace, but soon enough they’re revealed to bring, as Adderson slyly alludes, “The Thing With Feathers!” Through the birds, Marta’s hopeful third act sees her finding community and connection.
Homing may have an uncharacteristically pleasant ending, but the collection is full of stories that reimagine news articles or dance to the metre of Emily Dickinson poems. Started Early, Took My Dog, for example, not only borrows the title of Dickinson’s poem but uses it as a vehicle for exploring a particular sensation of implied gender violence. The dog in the story is a mutt named Jesus, who depressive Ani and her hypercompetent wife, Freya, ostensibly adopted for their autistic son, Drew. Where the speaker in Dickinson’s poem apprehends danger in sight of the ocean, Ani’s internal alarm first goes off when she notices a man in a red ball cap staring at her and Jesus from behind the playground’s fence.
Unsettled, she collects Drew and the dog. Later, on an early morning walk with Jesus in their quiet suburb, she feels a tingle of fear as she realizes the same man is now following her in his red Chevy. In Dickinson’s poem, the speaker narrowly escapes the threat of drowning but as she heads back to town from the shore, the sea follows her but then bows and gives her “a Mighty look” before retreating.
Adderson’s Ani remembers a graduate seminar “where the women around the table had agreed on the meaning of that Mighty look. There’d been a series of sexual assaults on campus that semester and the university had organized a safe-walk program. Yet the men – boys really – had scoffed at their interpretation, while the professor – cardiganed, geriatric – had merely twitched his lips.”
When collected, the stories in A Way to Be Happy offer a multifaceted, even prismatic investigation into the influence of gender on perception, particularly in moments of fear and loneliness. The weakest story of the collection, The Procedure is almost parodic in the way it depicts a man in midlife who has failed to foster intimacy with his family; as his first colonoscopy appointment draws near he finds himself with no one to turn to for comfort while he reckons with his own mortality – he’s barely seen his brother since their mom died and his son and wife treat him with chilly disinterest after an implied period of all too mundane masculine emotional neglect.
More successful is Yolki-Palki, where another isolated man, Varlam, contends with a different medical issue. The story has perhaps the collection’s most memorable opening line, “First, a tickle – not in his throat but the red bag of his lung.”
Instead of settling into sitcom tropes of unhappy family dynamics, Adderson here pairs mysticism and mystery to crack open another perspective on how past experiences ring through the body in the present. And like the opening story, All our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone (selected for the 2023 edition of Best Canadian Stories), the story shifts subtly into the surreal in a way that showcases Adderson’s skill with structure. Such shifts also, however improbably, feel more akin to life, where emotions overtake you and the stakes reveal themselves well after the cards have been dealt, than straight realism.
In the collection’s most daring – and funniest – story, Obscure Objects, Adderson makes a game of the way narrative works, of the way that veracity, consistency and sense-making in general are not fundamental requirements for story.
It begins as a tale about an MFA grad and aspiring writer, Charlotte, teaching English in a rundown private school. There Charlotte meets an old school acquaintance and befriends a lusty woman named Renata, whose perhaps mythological extramarital adventures quickly become the chimeric centre of the story.
Inspired by a Luis Buñuel film where different actresses play the main character, Adderson writes in discrepancies around the heroine, who has two sons, or rather two daughters, who is half Italian, or is the Canadian-born child of Chinese immigrants, or is Jewish, such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth, the writers idolized by Charlotte, the narrator who is “just an Anglican girl from Calgary.”
Obscure Objects doesn’t have a happy ending, necessarily, but reading it does create a sense of buoyancy and possibility. That, I suppose, counts as one way to be happy.
