The Happy Couple, Naoise Dolan
After seeing Naoise Dolan at Waterstones Brighton, I’m writing on the heels of the event and have so much more to say after hearing Dolan speak about her feelings towards the book and its characters, as well as her creative process – a delightfully convoluted process that involves tricking her impatient self into thinking it’s a game by completing different methodological steps in different languages.
This whimsical yet complex approach to language as a hobby/discipline is evident in The Happy Couple. Despite a relatively tragic plot, which involves the unraveling of a couple due to be wed, her prose remains playful. This is true of both the words chosen and the narrative structure, which jumps between both narrators and structure through lists and letters.
Dolan’s short, sharp, intentional yet carefree sentences are packed tight with meaning without being bedeutungsvoll (a German word she talked to us about that means pregnant with meaning), which makes sense knowing about her adoring, polyamorous relationship with language; she speaks English, Irish, German, Italian, Japanese, and is even dabbling with Russian in order to read more novels. RIP her TBR pile. All things considered, it’s no wonder her native English prose is somehow both intentional and effortless.
Onto the characters – those wonderful, loathsome human beings. In a review of Dolan’s first book, Exciting Times, I wrote that I hated the protagonist both for the ugliness she mirrored in myself and the horrors she spotlighted in others. With The Happy Couple, this is far more tangible, as there are five protagonists who are all part relatable, part incomprehensible. Despite a wedding ‘traditionally’ involving two primary people, it’s fair to say this one involves all five – and not just because they’ve all been romantically involved with either the bride or groom. The wedding inadvertently triggers a plethora of emotions in each of them, be they theological, political, or personal.
Perhaps my favourite part of this book is the raw humanity of it. For a group of people with such vivid inner lives made up of varying degrees of talent, money, wit, education and experience, they are all scared children fighting for the most attention, the biggest sweet and the best toy to make things all better, when really, they’re all just hungry for love.
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