Love and Happiness
A Novel
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Jean Banks won't give up on love. It's the prism through which she sees the world, the stuff of the independent movies she produces in New York City, and it created the son and daughter she shares with her director husband, Sam. But the course of love doesn't run smooth for a harried woman in her mid-thirties who feel her choices and responsibilities solidifying around her, becoming permanent. And what's wrong with keeping alive a private connection to love by remembering the paths not taken, the men not engaged with?
Love and Happiness tackles the eternal, essential subjects of love and commitment through one woman's struggle to sort out her romantic life. How will Jean resolve the emotional chaos raised in her heart by her attractions to her husband, a former flame and a mysterious but tantalizing stranger? Is it possible to love more than one man fully? Set partly in the illogical world of independent movies—a world author Galt Niederhoffer knows well—and in New York City and Los Angeles, Love and Happiness is a rich, intense story of love and attraction, choice and consequence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Niederhoffer's third book (after The Romantics) is the story of the effects of twenty-first century curiosity in a mundane marriage. The main character Jean is grinding through her job, trying to raise money for her films, and sagging under the burden of a husband who was once a "vital passionate young man" and is now an "aging, empty vessel." Jean remedies her lifeless marriage by drafting e-mailing to a former flame Doug but never presses send. Then she meets a man named Benjamin Kraft at a bar on a business trip who offers up his number. When he doesn't return her text later on, Jean searches the Internet for him, improbably concluding he is a criminal, maybe a murderer. More and more enticed, Jean hires a private investigator to track him. Ben finally returns her second text and they meet. Niederhoffer delivers pitch-perfect micro-renderings of human behavior throughout: describing "carnivores posing as vegans" in a bar, and "near-misses at wit" during a flirtation. But the strength of the novel is in Niederhoffer's ability to do this on a larger scale. She intricately portrays her dynamic protagonist as slightly unstable and only sort of self-aware.
Customer Reviews
Love AND Happiness
Such a wonderfully written book. So real, so touching. Written in such beautiful language. One of the most under appreciated writers today. A classic waiting to be read.