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“[A] dark and funny satire . . . Infidelities, secret identities and double-crosses . . . Reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.” —The Wall Street Journal
Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York--there you have an idea of Brock Clarke’s new novel. Filled with wonder and anger in almost equal parts,The Happiest People in the World is a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of paranoia and the all-American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it.
“A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan’s Heroes, full of authorial cartwheels of comedy and profundity.” —GQ
“The Happiest People in the World begins with a raucous bar scene featuring party streamers, smoke, prone bodies, spilled fluids and a stuffed moose with a surveillance camera in its left eye . . . [Clarke has] success in dreaming up oddball originals that have instant appeal.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“[Clarke] creates books that taste like delicious cuts of absurdity marbled with erudition.” —The Washington Post
“A whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption . . . His comedy of errors is impossible to put down.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A darkly hilarious novel . . . The writing is clever, the dialogue snappy and understated, and the effect is as pleasantly unsettling as anything Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ever wrote.” —The Portland Sun
“A zany and fast-paced book that explores the myriad ways people of all nations make themselves and others unhappy.” —Chicago Tribune, Printer’s Row
“Ranks among the funniest and most relevant social satires I’ve read . . . It might just make you the happiest reader in the world.” —The Dallas Morning News
- Sales Rank: #455552 in eBooks
- Published on: 2014-11-04
- Released on: 2014-11-04
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2014: It’s long been a credo of mine: any story that begins with a stuffed moose head on the wall of an upstate bar, a spy camera embedded in its eye looking down on a sprawl of gunshot victims… well, attention must be paid. And my attention to Brock Clarke’s weird, wise and witty fifth novel, The Happiest People in the World, never wavered. In a nutshell, sort of: a Danish cartoonist named Jens unwisely draws a cartoon of the Prophet, making him an assassin’s target and prompting the CIA to relocate him to America, where he poses as a high school guidance counselor in a small, strange New York town. That’s where the story gets truly bizarre, often hilariously so. I’m no fan of the term “laugh out loud,” but I did audibly chuckle, a lot. (Example: “it’s all good” really is “the most idiotic expression on the planet.”) Without giving too much away: Jens (now known as Henry) works for Matthew (the school principal), both nursing secrets, both victims of lies. But beneath the convoluted entanglements of small town love and small town spies—veering too close to madcap at times—there’s a deceptively touching story of flawed men who aren’t quite sure how to be fathers, husbands, or men. Or happy. --Neal Thompson
Review
“A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan’s Heroes, full of authorial cartwheels of comedy and profundity.” —GQ
“[Clarke knows] how to get a novel off to a snorting good start . . . The Happiest People in the World begins with a raucous bar scene featuring party streamers, smoke, prone bodies, spilled fluids and a stuffed moose with a surveillance camera in its left eye . . . [Clarke has] success in dreaming up oddball originals that have instant appeal.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“The funniest and smartest novel I have read in years. Yes! I thought, as I read these pages. That’s how you write a good book.” —Hannah Tinti, author The Good Thief
“[Clarke] creates books that taste like delicious cuts of absurdity marbled with erudition.” —The Washington Post
“[The Happiest People in the World] is relentlessly, and often hilariously, wrong on purpose. Brock Clarke . . . has never shied away from the ridiculous plot twist or the implausible personality quirk. And this new book is packed with them: Indeed, it is built almost entirely out of them. There is essentially nothing in it that, removed from context, makes any sense. Not that you would want it to . . . I can think of no other contemporary novel so preoccupied with the nature of familial love and romantic longing, and no other in which people are so concerned with their own obligations, and so far from comprehending what they actually are.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A zany and fast-paced book that explores the myriad ways people of all nations make themselves and others unhappy . . . Clarke's comedy is complex and packed with big ideas, but also wonderful sentences . . . This book is a goofball, but a goofball with an edge; its humor and quirkiness are not ends in themselves, but doors that Clarke uses to open the view out onto a bigger vista: the span of America, unto itself, and in relation to the world.” —Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row
“A whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption . . . Clarke dazzles with a dizzying study in extremes, cruising at warp speed between bleak and optimistic, laugh-out-loud funny and unbearable sadness. His comedy of errors is impossible to put down.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Brock Clarke's hilarious new novel starts out in rural Denmark, then takes us someplace really foreign and utterly weird: upstate New York. The parallel universe Clarke creates there is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder.” —Richard Russo, author of Elsewhere
“[A] dark and funny satire . . . The ridiculous confusion of infidelities, secret identities and double-crosses that plays out reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.” —Edith Pearlman, author of Binocular Vision
“If the literary category of ‘mordant fable’ exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.” —Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia
“Brock Clarke has long been one of my favorite writers, and this novel, good lord, is his best one yet. In The Happiest People in the World, Clarke portrays, with terrifying accuracy, the lives of people who constantly ruin things without ever quite understanding why or how, which eventually gives way to a strange kind of invulnerability. There is no writer who does this better than him, creating that wonderful mixture of unexpected, sharp comedy and genuine empathy. The Danes may be the happiest people in the world, but you can easily join those ranks by simply reading this amazing book.” —Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
From the Back Cover
“The funniest and smartest novel I have read in years.” —Hannah Tinti, author The Good Thief
“This novel, good lord, is his best one yet. Brock Clarke portrays, with terrifying accuracy, the lives of people who constantly ruin things without ever quite understanding why or how, which eventually gives way to a strange kind of invulnerability. There is no writer who does this better than he does, creating that wonderful mixture of unexpected, sharp comedy and genuine empathy. The Danes may be the happiest people in the world, but you can easily join those ranks simply by reading this amazing book.” —Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
“If the literary category of ‘mordant fable’ exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.” —Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia
“Brock Clarke’s hilarious new novel starts out in rural Denmark, then takes us someplace really foreign and utterly weird: upstate New York. The parallel universe Clarke creates there is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder.” —Richard Russo, author of Elsewhere
“Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.” —Edith Pearlman, auhor of Binocular Vision
“Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And he’s done it again in his brilliant The Happiest People in the World . . . I for one am grateful he’s out there—watching our every move.” —Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting, but much too stage-managed
By James Mowry
A Danish cartoonist, presumed dead and on the run after drawing a picture of Mohamed at his editor's behest, after which his house was burned down, takes refuge in upstate New York. Things ensue. While there is a lot to like about this book--the way the characters are drawn, the well-depicted settings, some sharp observations, particularly about marriage, there is also a manipulative aspect to the whole proceedings as the author brings the cast of characters back together for the climax. This is a pleasurable read, but the book only has a few moments of genuine humor, and is occasionally awkward in its prose. The author also has the hugely annoying habit of foreshadowing everything with phrases like, "that was the last time so-in-so would do such-and-such." That habit gets pretty annoying, and together with the book's ending, which doesn't really deliver the emotional payoff the author is perhaps trying for, it leaves this reader a bit cold. It's like looking at a painting that is well drawn--far beyond our own ability to do so--but still comes across as untrue to life. Your mileage may vary.
(I received a pre-release ebook version from Netgalley.)
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
More Novel than most Novels!
By Lance Cromwell
"The moose head was fixed to the wall, the microphone in its mouth was broken, but the camera in its left eye was working just fine, and as far as the moose head could see, this was just another Friday night in the Lumber Lodge! Perhaps even more Friday night than most Friday nights." Thus begins the wild, excellent, wicked~smart ride that is The Happiest People In The World, and this is anything but "just another" Novel... it is quite definitely more Novel than most Novels.
Clarke's most recent work is certainly a book that can hold contradictions, beautifully: It is a lightning fast read, but one that will encourage multiple readings... it is at once a sort of spy novel(but also, not), a playful romp, a darkly & deeply funny literary work, and underneath the fast-paced narrative, a quiet, heart-breaking meditation on the complicated, interlaced relationships that us humans find ourselves in, day~in and day~out. Happiest People is a snapshot of American Culture, as seen by both outsiders of the 'from another country' type, and by the outsiders that are from within this country (which is most of us who vote(or don't) by ballot, or by creative endeavor, or by good hard labor or one kind or another), the policy non-makers, the trend non-setters, the mass of people who are not on the inside, if such a thing exists.
On one level, this novel could be suggesting that there is no inside, nobody in-the-know, and that all that we see happening around us, and all that we are personally enveloped in, is a hodge podge of splinter groups acting out their lives along vectors that are sometimes lonely, often paranoid, and sometimes crash into others; and this at every level: government, education, in our homes. A horde of everyday people who have, as Aldous Huxley wrote, "failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions" and who will more frequently than not, ruin ourselves in the name of Love. And as sad as that may be, it is pretty damn funny, too, seen in the right light. Like, say, the light of the Lumber Lodge on a Friday night! Brock Clarke shows us to be the broken, but working (sort of) beings that we are, who see what we think we see, and react accordingly.
Were I to set to making a Super Smoothie! of writing that would begin to get at Clarke's creation here, i would have to throw in some (maybe all of) George Saunders for sure, some John le Carré, some Russell Banks, Richard Russo, David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro, Kurt Vonnegut, Andre Dubus, Tobias Wolff, Andrea Barrett, Joanna Scott, John Irving, David Sedaris, a dollop of Christopher Buckley, 5 or 6 stories from The Brothers Grimm, a bunch of Tony Hoagland poems, and a solid handful of pages from Them, by Jon Ronson; A House In The Sky, by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett; and Driving Mr. Albert, by Mike Paterniti. That's where i'd start, anyway... No doubt, i'd have to work a long time, and throw in a great many more works to really get at the subtlety, complexity, and sheer tastiness of The Happiest People In The World.
Like many people who are gifted, but then add to that gift by working really hard, Clarke makes an incredibly layered, complicated work seem effortless, and as such it is easy to read and fun, but thought-provoking, and poignant as well. No small feat, that. This is a book that I have already recommended widely to my friends, but feel it is one to be recommended widely to all of the reading public.
Do yourself a huge favor and get a hold of The Happiest People In The World!
Enjoy....
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
What's So Funny?
By William Wilson
It’s difficult to write a book, apparently set in the real world, which makes you care about its central characters while putting them in ludicrously implausible situations. Brock Clarke seems to have tried but hasn’t succeeded here. All would be forgiven if he injected some more humor into the proceedings. The back cover blurbs would lead you to believe that this is a humorous romp. Now, I think I enjoy quirky humor as much as anyone, but the only time I laughed out loud reading this book was when Clarke repeated an old Monty Python line (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries,” since you asked). The characters in this book aren’t funny; they’re pathetic, violent, and strange.
This book was provided through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program in exchange for an honest review.
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