This Is Happiness

September 23, 2019
In glorious and lyrical prose, Williams (History of the Rain) spins the tale of one 1958 season in the village of Faha, County Kerry, where young “Noe” Crowe, only 17 and already departed from the seminary, has washed up with his grandparents. The story opens on the Wednesday of Holy Week with the cessation of an almost constant rain, relieving the villagers of their life “under a fall of watery pitchforks.” To add to this wonder, the electricity is finally coming to Faha and with it a lodger at Ganga and Doady Crowe’s house. Christy McMahon is a man of broad experience who seems “as if it was he who told the world the joke of himself” and a perfect companion to Noe. During that late spring and early summer, Noe assists Christy in signing up the locals for electric service, and they spend their evenings on a quest for music at countryside pubs. Most important for Christy is his attempt to gain forgiveness from Annie Mooney, now Annie Gaffney, widow of the village chemist, a woman that Christy left at the altar decades before. Meanwhile, love springs on Noe unawares as he comes under the thrall, in succession, of each of the lovely Troy sisters, daughters of Faha’s doctor, whose attention Noe needs after an accident. Noe’s reminiscences of that period are full of beauty and hard-won wisdom. This novel is a delight.

October 1, 2019
The heart-expanding extremes of life--first love and last rites--are experienced by an unsettled young Dubliner spending one exceptional spring in a small Irish village. Christy McMahon "walked this line between the comic and the poignant," and so does Williams (History of the Rain, 2014, etc.) in his latest novel, another long, affectionate, meandering story, this one devoted to the small rural community of Faha, which is about to change forever with the coming of electricity to the parish. Delighting in the eccentricities of speech, behavior, and attitude of the local characters, Williams spins a tale of life lessons and loves new and old, as observed from the perspective of Noel Crowe, 17 when the book's events take place, some six decades older as he narrates them. Noel's home is in Dublin, where he was training to become a Catholic priest, but he's lost his faith and retreated to the home of his grandparents Doady and Ganga in Faha. Easter is coming, and the weather--normally infinite varieties of rain--turns sunny as electrical workers cover the countryside, erecting poles and connecting wires. Christy, a member of the electrical workforce, comes to lodge alongside Noel in Doady and Ganga's garret but has another motive: He's here to find and seek forgiveness from the woman he abandoned at the altar 50 years earlier. While tracing this quest, Williams sets Noel on his own love trajectory as he falls first for one, then all of the daughters of the local doctor. These interactions are framed against a portrait of village life--the church, the Gaelic football, the music, the alcohol--and its personalities. Warm and whimsical, sometimes sorrowful, but always expressed in curlicues of Irish lyricism, this charming book makes varied use of its electrical metaphor, not least to express the flickering pulse of humanity. A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.

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Starred review from October 1, 2019
Now an old man, Noel Crowe reflects on the spring when the eternal, infernal rains stopped pouring on the tiny hamlet of Faha and when the sun beat down with an undiscerning assurance. Along with the weather's good tidings came the Irish government's long-awaited promise of electrical service to this lone outpost. Christy is the man utility has charged with ushering the Fahaeans into the ways of the twentieth century. Noel was 17 then, mourning the death of his mother and living with his grandparents while pondering his fate of joining the priesthood. When Christy becomes their lodger, his presence not only heralds the vast changes that are in store for the villagers, he also provides a tutorial for Noel in the ways of the heart. It turns out that Christy is in Faha to do more than sign up new customers: he's there to atone to Annie Mooney, the woman he left at the altar some 50 years before. With a beckoning gentleness that belies the deeper philosophies at play, superb Irish author Williams (History of the Rain, 2014) offers a lilting, magical homage to time and redemption, and a stirring, sentimental journey into the mysteries of love and the possibilities of friendship.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)