Happiness

I loved Happiness when I first started it. I loved it still after the first couple discussions in class. And now that I've finished Happiness, I just liked it. It wasn't horrible, no. But it wasn't spectacular either. It wasn't too long and it certainly wasn't boring. A good read for sure, but it's nothing spectacular. It has all the same old gags, they're just wrapped in something new and shiny. But once the wrapping is gone it's just your same old, common, run of the mill, been there, done that kind of novel. A quick read with a couple laughs. 

The female characters fall into their usual stereotypical roles. You have May, the best friend/lover of Edwin and you have Jenni, the wife of Edwin. May is overweight, self conscious and bounces from diet to diet while hiding behind her crayola red lipstick. Her constant dieting reminds me of a scene from a movie in which one of the characters decides that it is her last day of carbs and so she goes home and begins stuffing her face with chocolate cake so quickly that she chokes on it. I could imagine that happening to May while she was between diets. And then we have Jenni. She was the girl other girls strived to become in high school. But, of course, she is in constant need of being reassured of her beauty. She's shallow, superficial and always in need of losing a quick 5 pounds. And even after she finds 'happiness' she is constantly looking to be assured of her new 'enlightenment'. "Do I look enlightened? Do I? Really?" 

We took a vote in class on Friday to decide if Happiness should stay on the reading list for the next class and I did vote that it should stay. I believe it is a novel worth reading.

As to the prompt you gave in class on Friday, I would have ended the book by still having Edwin save the world by publishing How to Be Miserable. But I also would have added to the ending by having Edwin finally pick up and read What I Learned on the Mountain, all the way through so he could become a happy, satisfied person in a world full of cynics. Just for the sake of making him different. He'd like that, yeah? Truth be told, I don't think I'd like my ending any more than the original.