Happiest People in the World (Clarke)

The Happiest People in the World:  A Novel
Brock Clarke, 2014
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616201111


Summary
Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York—there you have an idea of Brock Clarke’s new novel, The Happiest People in the World.

Who are “the happiest people in the world”? Theoretically, it’s all the people who live in Denmark, the country that gave the world Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and the open-face sandwich. But Denmark is also where some political cartoonists got into very unhappy trouble when they attempted to depict Muhammad in their drawings, which prompted protests, arson, and even assassination attempts.

Imagine, then, that one of those cartoonists, given protection through the CIA, is relocated to a small town in upstate New York where he is given a job as a high school guidance counselor. Once there, he manages to fall in love with the wife of the high school principal, who himself is trying to get over the effects of a misguided love affair with the very CIA agent who sent the cartoonist to him. Imagine also that virtually every other person in this tiny town is a CIA operative.

The result is a darkly funny tale of paranoia and the all-American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it, written in a tone that is simultaneously filled with wonder and anger in almost equal parts. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1968 (?)
• Where—Springfield, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Dickinson College
• Awards—Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction
• Currently—lives in Portland, Maine


Brock Clarke is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the novels The Happiest People in the World (2014), Exley (2010—a Kirkus Book of the Year, finalist for the Maine Book Award, and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (2008—American Library Associate Notable Book of the Year, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice pick). His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others.

Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, and Southern Review and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.

He lives in Portland and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College and in University of Tampa’s low residency MFA program. (Adaptd from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
[Clarke knows] how to get a novel off to a snorting good start.... The Happiest People in the World begins with a raucous bar scene featuring party streamers, smoke, prone bodies, spilled fluids and a stuffed moose with a surveillance camera in its left eye.... [Clarke has] success in dreaming up oddball originals that have instant appeal.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Brock Clarke…has never shied away from the ridiculous plot twist or the implausible personality quirk. And this new book is packed with them: Indeed, it is built almost entirely out of them. There is essentially nothing in it that, removed from context, makes any sense. Not that you would want it to…The Happiest People in the World is built for speed, not comfort. You have to lower yourself into it and let it carry you away. It's like what might have come to be had the Coen brothers collaborated with the Three Stooges: an energetic exercise in the incompatible mediums of dark humor and slapstick, in which nobody ever really knows what the hell is going on, the reader included—only that it hurts. Which is to say that the book is also emotional, sometimes very sweetly so. Clarke's work can be seen as a continuing investigation into American haplessness; his characters are forever powerless against their own worst impulses, and against the vicissitudes of fate
J. Robert Lennon - New York Times Book Review


[A] dark and funny satire.... The ridiculous confusion of infidelities, secret identities and double-crosses that plays out reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.
Wall Street Journal


Clarke may be playing with fire here, but he’s wearing so many oven mitts that the humor feels ham-fisted and lukewarm.... Which is a shame because The Happiest People in the World contains amusing elements—about marriage, small towns, Danes and spies—but they’re weighed down in the corpulent body of this novel.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


A zany and fast-paced book that explores the myriad ways people of all nations make themselves and others unhappy.... Clarke's comedy is complex and packed with big ideas, but also wonderful sentences.... This book is a goofball, but a goofball with an edge; its humor and quirkiness are not ends in themselves, but doors that Clarke uses to open the view out onto a bigger vista: the span of America, unto itself, and in relation to the world.
Chicago Tribune - Printers Row


A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan’s Heroes, full of authorial cartwheels of comedy and profundity.
GQ


(Starred review.) [A] whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption. Impulsive cartoonist Jens Baedrup leaves his wife and home in Denmark with the help of love-lorn CIA spy Locs (aka Lorraine).... Clarke dazzles with a dizzying study in extremes, cruising at warp speed between bleak and optimistic, laugh-out-loud funny and unbearable sadness. His comedy of errors is impossible to put down.
Publishers Weekly

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