The Half-life of Happiness - Softcover

Casey, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375706089 ISBN 13: 9780375706080

Publisher: Vintage, 1999

Synopsis

"[Casey] is an astute observer of the ruses as well as the private confrontations that govern our behavior."
--The Washington Post Book World

In The Half-life of Happiness, National Book Award winner John Casey brings us a family portrait rendered with masterful precision--and unwavering compassion. On a spring afternoon in Virginia, progressive attorney Mike Reardon strolls downtown Charlottesville feeling terrific. He surveys the elements in his appealing life: filmmaker wife Joss, his clever and canny daughters, the bohemian characters that share his seven-acre haven on the Rivanna River.

But Mike's blissful certainty is to be short-lived. A friend's suicide and Joss's affair with a mercurial woman turn Mike's world upside-down. Then Mike discovers the erotic quicksilver of the political campaign and so begins a farcical run for office that consumes all their lives. Here too--through Casey's brilliant rendering of Mike's sensitive, perceptive daughters--is the story of two children who grow up painfully aware of their parents' strengths and weaknesses. Superbly plotted, buoyed with humor and hope, The Half-life of Happiness embraces the accidents and choices that shape our lives and the lives of those we love.

"Riveting and beautifully written."  --San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner

"A major novelist at the top of his form, Casey captures not only the texture of individual lives, but the shape and momentum of all lives that begin with the best intentions, then stray off course. . . . A wise and forgiving book as well as an entertaining one."
--Chicago Tribune

About this title

Review:

Although The Half-Life of Happiness begins "For no reason he could think of, Mike felt terrific," the reader is not reassured. The details accrue with disturbing precision during Mike's walk across Charlottesville's Courthouse Square: clear spring sky, soft breeze, pretty tax specialist, bouncy tap-dance teacher, languorous bookstore clerk, charmingly stuttering woman doctor. Then we glimpse the house he shares with his wife and their two daughters: ramshackle, cluttered, incomplete--"a series of partly assembled kits for family happiness." Clearly, this is one marriage--one family--with trouble in its future. Of course, without trouble, there'd be no novel. Only in this case, the family is so fun, their circle of bright, articulate, bohemian friends so very winning, that watching them careen toward disaster has the same nasty inevitability as a horror movie: one wants to throw up a hand and say, "Wait! Don't go see what was making that noise upstairs!"

When trouble arrives, it takes the shape of Bonnie, the new girlfriend of one of their gang. Flirtatious and manipulative, with thin, "gobbly" lips, Bonnie seduces not Mike, surprisingly, but his caustically funny filmmaker wife, Joss. Watching his marriage crumble around him, Mike lets himself be persuaded to enter a congressional race that turns into a humiliating farce, while the couple's two daughters observe their parents' plight with unforgiving clarity. The author of the National Book Award-winning Spartina, Casey brings new energy to what could be a familiar story, and his take on the domestic novel, late 1970s style, is a masterpiece of finely drawn characters and meticulous detail.

About the Author:

John Casey was born in 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa. His novel Spartina won the National Book Award in 1989. He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is a professor of English literature at the University of Virginia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375706089
• ISBN 13: 9780375706080
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528