In fact, “Spectacular Happiness” turns out to be both a serious novel of ideas and a pretty good one. Careful readers of Kramer’s nonfiction know he’s got as deep an interest in human murk as any novelist. He hedges his advocacy of Prozac with disturbing reflections on how the personality changes it causes alter our conception of the self; and anyone looking for a yes-no answer in “Should You Leave?” would do better with a Magic 8-Ball. In “Spectacular Happiness,” Chip Samuels, a community-college teacher and handyman, is sane, mad, or both. He believes Prozac-like drugs exist to sell people on our getting-and-spending culture–which he resists by destroying rich people’s vacation homes with designer explosives.
Yet Chip insists his “spectacles” (hence the title) are not protests but art. “The explosion is absurd,” he says, showing a video clip. “But allowing ourselves to be moved by the image, we may come to see the house as absurd as well, and then to contrast the two absurdities.” His open-ended creative destructions suggest Kramer’s own ambiguity. He’s a better thinker, observer and describer than he is a storyteller, but the intellectual conflicts lend the book all the tension anybody should need. Given a world of rapacious capitalism and a planet whose oceans are rising, should you bomb? Two guesses.
Spectacular HappinessPeter D. Kramer (Scribner)
