Coupledom, for the 22-year-olds in Naoise Dolan’s debut, Exciting Times, is a fraught endeavour that can at best grant you temporary reprieve from the terror of your own brain and at worst lead to your complete annihilation. The slightly older pair at the centre of her new novel, The Happy Couple (they aren’t), are no longer spending most of their energies in relationships tallying the score. Now they linger on the qualities they love in their partners: his attention to detail; her love of music. Though the engagement that sparks this sharp-eyed marriage plot is almost an accident, the result of a passive-aggressive game of chicken gone too far, they will see it through. To do otherwise would require them to “share feelings”, which they do not do. “Have you met Irish people?”
It begins in Dublin, with a triangle. Celine is an aloof concert pianist with self-destructive tendencies living in the world of abstraction; her boyfriend Luke’s destructiveness tends to ricochet on to the people he professes to love. Maria, Celine’s ex, is intellectually and erotically a better match for her but interpersonally hard work. If an engagement pulls two co-conspirators into a seemingly airtight plot – everything hurtling towards the main event – in The Happy Couple, other people trouble the narrative’s unfolding.
