Whatever Makes You Happy

May 2, 2005
Sally Farber has everything a 40-year-old New Yorker could want: a loving doctor husband; two healthy, adorable daughters; great friends; and a charming book editor who used to be her lover and still calls her Cookie. Sally's fourth book is The History of Happiness
, and there's the rub. The deeper she digs, the more elusive a definition of happiness becomes (is contentment just "resignation wearing a funny hat?"), and the more bedeviled she is by the guilty certainty that she isn't as happy as she should be. The great charm of Grunwald's sweet, comic novel is that it's two books: the one Sally's writing and the one about her. So why doesn't it feel more substantial? Certainly Sally's ironic enough, so you can't knock her for starving amid plenty. But there's something perfunctory about her affair with a famous artist when her girls go to sleep-away camp. Although she deems it a self-destructive act akin to cutting herself after her father's death when she was 19, the reader never doubts the affair will end without scars, and she will rediscover that happiness is a warm husband. Grunwald is smart, funny and talented enough for a reader to want one thing more—the unexpected. Agent, Liz Darhansoff.

May 15, 2005
In this latest from Grunwald ("The Theory of Everything"), something of a book within a book, New Yorker Sally Farber is writing a history of happiness. With deadlines looming and her two daughters leaving for summer camp for the first time, Sally finds that her intellectual research has prodded open personal concerns about her topic. She begins to examine her marriage of 16 years to her childhood sweetheart, her premarital romances, her unwavering bonds to her daughters, her exasperating relationship with her elderly mother, and her friendship with her very driven and successful best friend. Thrown into this soup is Sally's task of cleaning out and preparing to sell the apartment where she grew up and a throw-caution-to-the-wind attraction to a world-famous painter. Grunwald's interweaving of scholarly quotations about happiness and excerpts of real-life research on the matter cleverly ground this novel, in which the main character is on the verge of spinning out of control as she searches for her own brand of happiness. Chock-full of penetrating and wry perceptions, this novel is recommended for all public libraries. -Maureen Neville, Trenton P.L., NJ

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