Happiest People in the World (Clarke)

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