This Is Happiness
This Is Happiness
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Niall Williams on This Is Happiness
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A birthday, a blackout, and a sentence that wouldn’t let goThe subject of rural electrification was not something Williams stumbled onto in a library. His father ran the ESB, Ireland’s national electricity company, so stories of the grid were part of his childhood furniture. When he and his wife Christine Breen moved to County Clare in 1985, they arrived as the youngest people in the neighborhood, surrounded by elderly neighbors whose memories of the day the lights first came on were still fresh and specific. One neighbor described coming home from school as a girl and being given the honor of flipping the switch for the first time. The novel is set in 1958, the year the rural electrification scheme reached the west of Ireland.
[paraphrased from audio] Williams described how his father spent his career as the head of the ESB — Ireland’s national electricity company — meaning he grew up hearing stories of electricity from childhood. The novel is set in 1958, the year the rural electrification scheme reached the west of Ireland. It is also the year Williams was born.
The year 1958 carries one more charge: it is also the year Williams was born. The novel’s setting and its author share a birthdate, and that coincidence was not accidental.
Before any of the novel’s people or events existed, a single sentence arrived and refused to be ignored. Williams’s previous novel, ‘History of the Rain,’ had been saturated in constant Irish downpour, and the next book needed, by some internal logic, to open with rain stopping. What he found in that sentence was not a beginning but a weight: the feeling that a whole novel was already there, invisible, waiting to be drawn out.
A sentence comes into my head. ‘It had stopped raining,’ for instance, in This is Happiness. And something about that arrests me. And for the next while some part of my mind is looking at the implications of that sentence, aware or believing that there is an entire novel below or behind it, and I just have to stay thinking about it.
Forty years of living among the people of west Clare left Williams with something he felt obliged to write toward. His neighbors had helped him and Breen survive the lean early years with nothing asked in return, and that generosity accumulated into a subject. The book was not built from research or argument but from the residue of a community he had watched long enough to love.
I want to write from a place of love; love of the world, love of these people with all their foibles, strangeness, oddities, kindnesses, generosities and chivalries. And just warmth.
How he wrote it
One thread, pulled gently, for as long as it heldWilliams does not plot in advance or draft from an outline. He begins with a first sentence and pulls the story out of it, one sentence at a time, composing aloud and often leaving each morning’s session hoarse. The method requires a particular kind of faith: that the whole novel already exists, and that patience rather than planning is what reveals it.
The closest I have come to explaining the process is that the first sentence feels like the tip of a thread. I pull it very gently. Another sentence. And again I try, teasing out phrase after phrase and hoping that the thread will not break. It is as if before me there is an invisible garment of which only one thread can be seen. Each day I draw it out a little further.
The decision to make Noel, known as Noe, narrate from the vantage of a 78-year-old looking back on a single summer sixty years earlier was a structural answer to a problem: how to write about 1958 without producing a period piece. The dual time frame gave Williams two things a straightforwardly historical narrative couldn’t: the rawness of a 17-year-old experiencing first love for the first time, and the earned perspective of someone old enough to understand what that summer cost.
I didn’t want to write a ‘historical’ or period novel as such, by just setting it in the ‘50s. I think many of us also have a time in our youth, maybe a very brief time like a summer or a few weeks when we were first most alive, or, as the narrator says, first discovered what it meant to be a fully human being... Also, of course, I am an old man myself, and know something of what it feels like to be looking back at a raw younger self.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Niall Williams”Christy, the stranger who arrives in Faha, the novel’s fictional County Clare village, chasing a woman he walked away from years before, did not come from Williams’s imagination alone. He was born from a literary question Williams had been carrying since reading J. M. Synge’s play. At the end of ‘The Playboy of the Western World,’ the charming blow-in Christy Mahon leaves the village and the woman who loved him; Williams simply refused to let the story end there.
Christie was born out of the character Christie Mahon in Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World. I often wondered if, at the end of play, when Christie leaves Pegeen and goes off for a life of adventure, did he regret it? Did he want to come back and find her?
The novel’s unhurried pace, its willingness to spend pages on weather and minor characters and the drift of a pub conversation, prompted some readers to ask where the plot was. Williams had a precise model in mind for the rhythm he wanted, one drawn from lived experience in Clare rather than from literary tradition. He wanted the reader to stop watching for what happens next in the same way you stop checking the clock during a traditional music session.
In the case of This Is Happiness, for instance, I am trying to mirror the out-of-time meander of an evening at a traditional music session in a pub, when no one looks at the clock and we go on until we get to the end.
Williams has always been conscious of being an outsider in Clare, arriving as a young Dubliner and remaining, by local reckoning, a blow-in for decades. Writing the novel forced a change in that self-understanding. He described the experience in terms that suggest the book changed something in him that forty years of living there had not fully settled.
While writing This Is Happiness, I fell in love with the place. I fell in love with it. And I didn’t want to finish writing that book. I thought, ‘You know, I could just keep writing this book, it could just go 10,000 pages.’ [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A vocation, and the nerve to say the title aloudThe title of the novel required a kind of courage Williams had not anticipated. After publication, he found that saying ‘This Is Happiness’ in conversation produced a small but real social friction, as though contentment itself had become an unfashionable position. He wrote about the experience directly, noting that the discomfort was not really about his book.
it was not just me but the idea of happiness itself that was out of step with the times, and that it required some mental adjusting, not to say daring, to say aloud the title of my novel.
Williams has described his relationship to writing in terms that go beyond craft or career. The remark below was made in the context of a critical reception he found limiting, but it points to something older: a sense that the books he writes are not chosen so much as assigned, and that his job is to stay faithful to them rather than to any external expectation of what Irish literary fiction should look like.
I have a vocational sense about writing... I am here to write the books I’m supposed to write, not the books a reviewer in The Irish Times would like.
What he wants us to sit with
Happiness as an act of will, and Faha as a place to return toThe book’s governing idea, that you can stop at almost any moment of your life and name it happiness simply because you are alive to name it, is an argument Williams makes without apology. He is aware it sounds naive. He states it anyway, which is itself part of the point.
It sounds ridiculous, when you say I want to write about the generosity of the human spirit, but I want to write about that richness.
Inside the book’s larger philosophical claim sits a quieter one about a specific kind of love. Ganga and Doady, Noe’s grandparents, do not make speeches about their marriage. Williams wanted to write that register of devotion — the kind that accumulates over decades rather than announces itself — as seriously as any other subject in the novel.
I wanted to celebrate a marriage like theirs and the kind of unshowy but actual love of living with somebody and allowing them to be each other.
The book’s afterlife during the pandemic revealed something about what it had been building toward all along. Faha, the invented village where the novel is set, became for readers in lockdown a place they could travel to when travel was impossible. Williams observed this with some wonder, having written the book as a love letter to a community rather than as a comfort object.
I think people were missing a sense of community, and they found that in Faha. People weren’t able to travel, but they could travel to Faha in the book.
The book’s relationship to time is not incidental to its meaning but is its mechanism. By setting the story between a moment when rain stops and the moment it starts again, Williams was reaching for the feeling of a protected interval, a space where ordinary clock time does not apply. That design is what the book asks readers to feel, not just to notice.
The stopping of the rain, whether real or imagined in recall, has an element of taking the story outside of time. The book takes place literally between two drops of rain.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Niall Williams”