The opening section of I Want You to Be Happy is an excellently droll and surefooted description of a man and a woman meeting in a bar, trying to make conversation over the music and flirting vaguely. They establish that she is 23 and that he is 35. All the specifics – the name or location of the bar, the music, even the names of the couple – are for now redacted: “After a while, the twenty-three-year-old woman raised her voice and, referring to the thirty-five-year-old man, asked her short-haired friend: ‘How old do you think he is?’ The short-haired friend surveyed the thirty-five-year-old man’s face; thought for a moment. ‘Forty?’ The twenty-three-year-old woman snort-laughed. ‘He’s thirty-five.’”
Jem Calder, like his protagonists, is bang on trend. His 2022 short story collection, Reward System, was widely admired; this debut novel employs a factual and affectless prose of the sort you’d find in Sally Rooney or Vincenzo Latronico, with a fastidious attention to the surfaces of the world that suggests Nicholson Baker or Bret Easton Ellis or even early Don DeLillo humming in the background. As that opening suggests, these figures are, or could be, representative.
