Readers of Lori Ostlund’s new story collection “Are You Happy?” are likely to answer her titular question with a resounding yes after reading the book. But for the characters on the page, the answer is not so simple.
These nine stories, including a 50-page novella, mostly feature protagonists with fulfilling personal or professional lives, and yet they are incomplete, bereft of some affection, appreciation, approval or answer that leaves them melancholy at best. No character recurs in multiple stories, but the stories emerge from permutations of recurring character components.
Most stories center on a couple, usually queer, with one discontented partner whose malaise often relates to an estranged parent. For the queer characters, that parent is typically unwilling to accept their child’s sexuality. The main characters generally hail from Minnesota and New Mexico, as do Ostlund and her wife. Everyone has pet cats and one partner is frequently enrolled in or teaching an overwhelming writing class.
The collection opens with the richest of the bunch, “The Bus Driver,” which looks at childhood friends who grew apart once Clare moved away from their small Minnesota hometown and found love with her attorney wife, while Jane got stuck due to the “considerable list” of things that went “wrong in her life.” The first item on this list relates to a moment when Clare did the “right” thing when she and Jane were tweens, but nonetheless derailed Jane and her family’s lives.
Another standout is the title story, about a gay man named Phil who, upon returning home to care for his dying mother, recalls how his life was shaped by a fling he had with a married man while on a college graduation trip. It’s the only story that features parents, in Phil’s in-laws, who are openly — and hilariously — supportive of their queer child, and the contrast between them and Phil’s own mother, who even from her deathbed can’t openly acknowledge her son’s sexuality, is heartbreaking.
Side characters can lean on tropes, like an ex-military gun lover and a violent cop, but the “After the Parade” author uses these blunt tools to craft otherwise sensitive, introspective stories that sometimes contort themselves to see both sides. In “The Peeping Toms,” one half of a lesbian couple tries to empathize with the man who spied on her showering, and in “The Stalker,” the teacher of the aforementioned gun lover doesn’t admit to a proactive administrator that she’s been threatened by the menacing student. (Both women, thankfully, have pragmatic wives.)
Ostlund’s narrators seem determined to ensure that readers don’t get the wrong idea, immediately qualifying potentially offensive phrasing, including the narratively relevant usage of “crazy,” “crippled” and “in the loony bin.” This tendency to over-explain detracts from what is so clearly well-intentioned storytelling, but never more so than in “The Stalker” when a nerve-wracking scene of the teacher walking to her car at night, “keys laced between [her] fingers,” is undercut one page later by the narrator unnecessarily spelling out what we just felt so viscerally: “Well, that is the specter of violence that women live with.”
All nine stories were previously published in literary journals, and given the collection’s recurrent narrative beats, it might optimally be enjoyed slowly, rather than in a single sitting. But regardless of your approach, you’ll certainly find something here that makes you happy.
