The Happiest People in the World
By Brock Clarke
My experience with thrillers is limited, I think due to the fact that those I have read start too slow for the genre to grab me. It’s all the important table setting, putting the pieces on the board so they can be captured later in the game. When the slow burn pays off, it’s like a good mystery, but with more ongoing tension. Like Gone Girl and thrillers I’ve read before, The Happiest People in the World began so slowly, I had to put the book down twice before starting my third and final read. It’s not that it was boring. The characters of Brock Clarke’s novel were the charming glue that kept me coming back so many times. Their tangle of lives would have been enough momentum to keep me going in a straightforward lit book. For the stakes to be so high and the characters so lovable, I wish the plot had clipped along at a rate that matched their intensity. It was the possibility that didn’t pan out fast enough that kept scaring me away.
The pitch of The Happiest People in the World, ripped from the headlines, is a dutch cartoonist who naively participates in the dialogue around drawing Muhammed, who then has to go into witness protection after his home is fire bombed by a couple of impassioned teens. As soon as he gets to his new home in America, the stakes of that situation melt away and the more real, interpersonal story unfolds. It’s as if the super high stakes intro to the story was just to get the reader invested, when in reality it’s the least interesting part of the plot. When Jens the cartoonist gets to Broomeville in middle-of-nowhere New York, the reader gets to meet the local cast of characters, some involved in the larger plot of espionage, some simply ordinary people trying to survive in a run-down American town. It’s an odd oscillation between the high intensity mystery keeping Jens safe and the family drama that plays out at the local high school. I liked the more ordinary person story much more, but when espionage elements came back nearer the end of the book, it fit into everything so nicely that I don’t wish it cut from the earlier, slower sections.
Clarke begins his book with a prologue narrated by a stuffed moose head who can see everything through a camera in his eye, and hear nothing through a broken microphone. It comically narrates what is so clearly a disaster, that then both looms over and disappears into the rest of the book. When that scene returns and it’s from the perspective of the alive human characters of the book, I was surprised to see that I still had twenty pages to go. The epilogue that follows after the climax of the book does not feel shoehorned for the sake of an ending. It lacks resolution and offers few answers to the reader, leaving them with the dissatisfied sense that the remaining characters feel. That no matter what greater meaning or action you may try to take from life, it will simply be what it is.