Happiness Comes From Nowhere by Shauna Gilligan

Happiness Comes From Nowhere by Shauna Gilligan (2012, 

Happiness Comes From Nowhere by Shauna Gilligan is one of the very best debut novels I have read in many years.   The prose is masterful and it takes us deeply into the characters, who we feel we know and care about in all their too human frailty.    It is rooted in place, in contemporary Ireland with some side trips to Rome and elsewhere, but its themes are universal.   It deals with the core issues of human existence


The novel opens with us sitting in on the attempted suicide of Dirk, the main male character in Happiness Comes From Nowhere.   The attempted suicide is very well depicted and felt very real, almost uncomfortably so.     Of course I wanted to know what forces could have driven a young man in the prime of life to think that suicide was his best option.   Gilligan is too sensitive an artist and too close a student of the human condition  to try to directly answer this question for us in a linear fashion by simply narrating sad events in his life (we all have sad events).   The rhetoric of fiction in this novel involves multiple view points, shifts in time and alteration of the prose style in order that the form of the work itself echo the narrative action.  


I will try to explain a bit what I mean by this.  I think  that Gilligan is forcing us to work to put together a linear narrative so we can feel the discordant forces impacting on the mind of Dirk.  

As I was reading Happiness Comes From Nowhere I somehow had a flashback to a class on early modern art that I took many years ago.   One of the themes of Happiness Comes From Nowhere is the nature of knowledge, memory, and the construction of history.   In a way, Gilligan is almost doing in a novel what the Cubists tried to do in their movement (time frame 1907 to 1921.)   This quote from Wikipedia is very useful:

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.

I see the among the ancestors of Happiness Comes from Nowhere, Ford Madox Ford's great masterwork, Parade's End and my favorite Virginia Woolf novel, The Waves.

Stepping back a bit, the relationship of Dirk and his mother is brilliantly developed.   Shortly after the segment on the suicide attempt of Dirk we see how much his mother loved and cherished him in his very early ages when his mother goes through the agony of placing him in a school for the first time.  The novel is also about the search for human happiness.   We see characters try to find it or to void out their despair at their inability to do so through drugs, alcohol and casual sexual relations.   There are a lot of quirky minors characters that sort of serve as mini commentaries on the search for happiness from an Aunt dedicated or emerging her self in the role of good auntie to a woman spying on others at a hotel.   Sometimes if one cannot find happiness one can try to find solace in making ourselves appear morally superior to those who do.   This is a serious novel but it is also fun to read as we witness Dirk's various relationships with women.   We also get a good look at the marriage of Dirk's parents, Sepp and Mary.    

I liked Happiness Comes From Nowhere so much and felt such depth of meaning in the pages of the book that I read it back to back twice in a row, something I have not done since I read Gravity's Rainbow nearly four decades ago.   It is also funny, very well plotted and the prose style is hauntingly beautiful.

Gilligan has a very interesting web page where you can learn more about her work and read some of her shorter fiction.

Happiness Comes From No Where is available in both Kindle and paperback editions through Amazon, on the publisher's web page, and in book stores throughout Ireland.

I want also to quote from the publisher's description of the novel to make sure I am doing all I can to convey the power of this work and to let you see what two of Ireland's leading writers think of the book.

Happiness Comes From Nowhere 

Happiness Comes From Nowhere follows the lives of the Horn family: Mary, Sepp and Dirk. Their paths cross and intertwine with those of extended family, friends and acquaintances as journeys are made through the changing city of Dublin. People also venture further in search of happiness: Mary and Dirk wander the streets of Rome and Ita watches a cargo ship unload in Spain. Expressed in ways as different as suicide, art and sex, the inseparable pangs of loss and happiness – remembered and present – are threaded through the novel.

Reviews

'A refreshingly thoughtful novel, poised and unpredictable. Delicious in its sensuous details and mischievous sense of humour. Happiness Comes from Nowhere is a truly impressive debut from a writer of exceptional talent.'

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

'In Shauna Gilligan’s unsettling novel-in-stories, Dirk has troubles that his mother Mary may not be able to right, much as she tries. Gilligan writes intimately of one mother’s possessiveness, devotion and ambition for her son. Rich with insight, this is a book that informs as much as it haunts. As a début it is a very fine piece of work.’

Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Happiness Comes from Nowhere is the sort of book that rewards a single reading; the parts fit together like a jigsaw, and it’s nice to keep them fairly close in one’s mind so that the narrative thread remains pretty whole. I liked the way that characters were introduced and having bit parts in one story then become the centre of a later story. And yet, although each part can stand alone, there is a narrative development about loss, which comes together towards the end.

Author Biography

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Shauna Gilligan has worked and lived in Mexico, Spain, India and the UK. She holds an MA in History from University College Dublin having also studied English as an undergraduate. She is completing a PhD in Writing at the University of Glamorgan, Wales and occasionally lectures in NUI Maynooth in Creative Writing.

As part of her research, she is examining suicide and writing processes in a selection of novels by and in a series of interviews with Irish writer Desmond Hogan.

Her work has been published in The Cobalt Review, The Stinging Fly (online), The First Cut, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writingand in The Ulster Tatler’s Literary Miscellany. She has given public readings of her fiction in Ireland and USA and has presented on writing at academic conferences in Ireland, UK, Germany and USA.

I endorse Happiness Comes From Nowhere to all lovers of fine fiction and I hope to see Gilligan write many more works.  

As mentioned early, there will be an interview with Gilligan posted in a few days.

Mel u