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.

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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.

EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, the best kind of economic microhistory

EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge
IAN KUMEKAWA
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

LISTEN TO THE AUTHOR ON SMARTY PANTS!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The rise of globalization and financialization as seen from a barge—one Swedish barge, to be exact, built in 1979

What do a barracks for British troops in the Falklands War, a floating jail off the Bronx, and temporary housing for VW factory workers in Germany have in common? The Balder, a single barge that served all three roles. Though the name would eventually change to Finnboda 12. And then to Safe Esperia. And later on, to the Bibby Resolution. And after that . . . in short, a vessel with so many names, and so many fates, that to keep it in our sights—as the protagonist of this fascinating economic parable—Ian Kumekawa has no choice but to call it, simply, the Vessel.

Despite its sturdy steel structure, weighing 9,500 deadweight tons, the Vessel is a figure as elusive and abstract as the offshore market it comes to a world of island tax havens, exploited labor forces, free banking zones, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and mass incarceration, where even the prisoners are held offshore. Fitted with modular shipping containers, themselves the product of standardized global trade, the ship could become whatever the market demanded. Whether caught in an international dispute involving Hong Kong, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the Virgin Islands—to be settled in an English court of law—or flying yet another foreign “flag of convenience” to mask its ownership—the barge is ever a container for forces much larger than even its hulking self.

Empty Vessel is a jaw-dropping microhistory that speaks volumes about the global economy as a whole. In following the Vessel—and its Sister Vessel, built alongside it in Stockholm—from one thankless task to the next, Kumekawa connects the dots of a neoliberal world order in the making, where regulation is for suckers and “Made in USA” feels almost quaint.

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My Review: I love microhistories. They're so sweeping. They explain so much of life, and politics, and economics. Marc Levinson's terrific THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, for a foundational read in this subject, is another sweeping microhistory to read and enjoy. Or maybe "value" is a better word; the prose in a microhistory is of secondary importance. Clarity is, or should be, the author of a microhistory's primary aim.

Author Kumekawa, Harvard historian by day, read that lesson, internalized it, and applies it to every piece of this complex-but-not-complicated story of the modern world using one barge's life history. The interconnectedness of the global economy, the ways and means of the greedy to avoid scrutiny...always, always it boils down to greed...and detailing the astonishing accumulation of profit from unglamourous quotidian needs-meeting.

What makes the story of a floatel/mobile military barracks/overflow prison as engrossing in this book is the carefully constructed mental diagram of interconnections of the barge's redesigns and refits and destinations. It was, however, that very complexity that knocked off my fifth star. Just too much work needed to follow them all to derive the full import of his points will cost even the most felicitous of writers a star. Shopping for the least profit-trimming places to "register" the barge...that's code for "who will take a small enough bribe for it to be cheaper than actual safety maintenance?"...as seaworthy and owned by a legitimate business has kept the author's research interesting. I expect his search history caused the FBI, NSA, and other initialism-yclept shadow dwellers a good deal of curiosity.

Why I myownself want you to read it is that it uses something very simple as a lens to focus attention on the quiet parts of capitalism that very badly need saying out loud. The money the owners of this barge collected was never huge, but was "protected" from taxation so greater in effect than simple face value. It is the fundament...double sense very much intended...of international capital's business model.

In case you're new here, I do not subscribe to the "greed is good" mindset.

Author Kumekawa's done us a solid in getting curious one day when he heard of a prison barge moored in New York City's river. (I think it's the East River, but can't be sure...could be the Bronx River, could be Long Island Sound, but I'm too lazy to look it up.) Where it's led him is the place I hoped it would go: The bank lobby where the capitalsts hide their ill-got gains from the people whose labor produces them.

Good choice for a read in the present political climate.

COMMON SENSE ECONOMICS: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, everyone should know but not believe this is Received Truth

COMMON SENSE ECONOMICS: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity
VARIOUS AUTHORS
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The fully revised and updated fourth edition of the classic Common Sense Economics.

As the global economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic and debates over the future of work challenge our long-held preconceptions about what careers and the market can be, learning the basics of economics has never been more essential. Principles such as gains from trade, the role of profit and loss, and the secondary effects of government spending, taxes, and borrowing risk continue to be critically important to the way America's economy functions, and critically important to understand for those hoping to further their professional lives—even their personal lives.

Common Sense Economics discusses these key points and theories and more, using them to show how any reader can make wiser personal choices and form more informed positions on policy. Now in its fourth edition, this classic from James D. Gwartney, Jane S. Stroup, Dwight R. Lee, and Tawni H. Ferrarini has been fully updated to include commentary on the effects of the pandemic on the global economy and the workplace; it offers insight into political processes and the many ways in which economics informs policy, illuminating our world and what might be done to make it better.

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My Review: Not entertaining, not as dry as a textbook either. Densely packed tendentious freemarketeering with a curious blind spot to how its own examples undermine its Hayek-lite assumptions about how the economy (as though that was one readily definable, easy-to-encompass in words, entity) works and should work. I think any book that trumpets a viewpoint, eg "low taxes good" here, should be honest enough to mark this out as editorializing. More especially since their own chosen examples of, eg, businesses seeking tariffs on imported goods to protect their market share presented without the expected free-trader's opprobrium, sorta gives the lie to the book's claims to being "commonsense" since this violates their own oft-reinforced (I fought myself hard to strive for neutrality I do not feel by changing the word from the judgmental but truthful "repeated") statements supporting "low taxes good."

The revisions undertaken post-COVID really ought honestly to have been labeled "post-China falling from favor." As a policy guide, not recommended, then. But for an economics explainer of how neoliberal economics wants you to think it works...modern research undermines the existence of the core neoliberal concept of "rational actors"...it's solid and as easy as it can get. All my stars for that useful quality.

Stay skeptical, then, and remember any time someone wants you to think a system is infallible, or "self-correcting," or "maximizing efficiency," they're not just factually incorrect but wrong. Plus almost guaranteed to be manipulating you for their own (however broad a definition of "their" you care to apply) benefit.