HAPPY LIFE, not a buck-up-bucko book despite the title

HAPPY LIFE
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A tender and wistfully satirical novel about the desire to change your life by bestselling French author David Foenkinos

"Foenkinos's surreal yet relatable novel…considers life in our age of anxiety, when other people's picture-perfect lives make our own seem drab in comparison." —Washington Post

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wants to be someone else.

Eric Kherson—40, divorced, distracted—is spiraling. He has devoted his life to a successful career as the marketing director of a leading sports brand. But when family disaster rocks him to his core, he finds himself adrift from his family and questioning all his choices.

That is, until an acquaintance from his schooldays offers him a high-powered government position. Desperate for escape, he throws himself into her enigmatic world of high-risk deals and endless networking, doing anything it takes to get a contract signed.

But on a business trip to Seoul, Eric starts feeling worse than ever. Wandering the city's streets, he comes across Happy Life, a store that offers its customers something that could change their lives: a fake funeral. Happy Life will write your eulogy, arrange the flowers, and allow you to lie inside your own coffin. Why? They believe the experience will help you reinvent yourself.

But above all for Eric, Happy Life sparks a business venture of his own that might do just that…

A celebrated French bestseller, Happy Life is a life-affirming story of hope and recovery, perfect for fans of Matt Haig and Nathan Hill.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am on record as a David Foenkinos fanboy. I have not (yet, anyway) rated any of his books I've read under four stars. I'm pickin' up what he's puttin' down because he's willing to take a classically realist setting and stitch some strangeness onto it. It's never a huge dissonance, it doesn't feel as though some clumsy editor from a different decade bookhorned a bad idea into the story...it's happened to other authors. I'm always *sure* this story of his I'm reading right then will be Foenkinos' breakout hit, and all y'all will see how Right I am about his humor, delicate honesty, and how very deftly Sam Taylor captures it in English!

To date, not so much. I persevere. I'm shocked that y'all read Solvej Balle's riff on Groundhog Day in your tens of thousands and shun a more fun version of the "things fall apart, emotions have entropy, no one gets outta here alive" story. There are over a thousand reviews of this book on Goodreads, average high three stars. Given the quotidian subject matter...there must be more than this...that strikes me as decent.

Happy Life, the business, is a very interesting conceit. Pretend you're dead. Read your obituary. Lie in your future coffin. Now, when you get up, think "is this good enough?" I'll bet most people look at life without depth until confronted with Death, the Reaper, the dirt nap, whatever euphemism tickles your fancy, whose cold grasp is very strongly focusing to everyone who feels it. Eric, our PoV character, is middle-aged, mid-career, peaking in power. He's miserable in the depressed person's way, shrouded in grey fog and honestly unable to see why that's even a problem anymore.

That's the true danger point, when a new challenge (his new job as a trade representative for France in this case) only points up the essential sameness of Life and futility of hope. On a mission to Seoul, Eric discovers Happy Life and its weird conceit of fake-deathing yourself to shed the fog, pull off the shroud of sameness, rise from the coffin renewed and revitalized. It works. And if it worked for Eric, unhappy and unable to think *why* he should be when he's got money, power, and purpose, then it probably will for other wealthy French people.

Can money buy happiness after all?

A mean little stereotype says literary fiction needs to be depressing. A cultural insult says French fiction's full ashtrays and empty lives must end stories in ennui. Both might've been true in the 1970s or 1980s but even then it was books written for the haute bourgeoisie, the people who had too much of everything so did not need anything; that's a soul-killer, that is, any era or country. Look at the billionaires today, they're purposeless and useless so they frivol away their substance on useless stuff while real problems need solving.

Eric brings Happy Life to France in order to jolt people into the same sense of purpose, of wanting something more important and rewarding than "more." Spoiler: Eric is a helluva salesman, as his entire career has shown.

Author Foenkinos is not writing for Literati. He's writing to tell people who like stories a story about a man who faces endings by casting about until he finds a new beginning. I like that story; it's not one we see in upper-echelon-aimed books but it's honestly all the better for it. It doesn't do that American thing of chirping five easy steps at you, just do *this* and you're all set MLM happy-clappy horseshit. It's a story that starts from "sad man doesn't want to be sad" and moves on from there through the steps of doing whatever comes his way to setting out with intention and purpose when one shows up worth his while.

It's not experimental literary or boundary-pushing shenanigans. It's a French guy writing a story he figures will resonate with French people of the 2020s. Is it also critiquing the PTB and their greed? Yeah, that's in there, but it's not what thee and me will see first. It's not yelling at you. It's on the next barstool over talking on the phone to someone who needs the same commonsensical splash of water you need.

I liked it, didn't fall madly in love with it, and think we need more like it from countries all over the world to show us how common this malaise really is. Better than floundering in the dark foggy corners wondering if we're alone in our befuddlement.