Back in the 80s and early 90s, I read, and enjoyed a lot of stories written by Laurie Colwin, so when I picked up one of her novels Happy All the Time, I expected to really enjoy it.

This is the story of two male cousins, third cousins, but we’ll go with cousins, Guido Morris and Vincent Cardworthy. They are very different, and yet good friends, and when the novel opens they are both in Cambridge. Vincent initially hoped to win a Nobel prize for physics while Guido intended to “write poetry in heroic couplets.” But practicality intervenes and Guido has a law degree, but disliked the work and returns as a graduate student of literature before taking over the “Morris family trust–the Magna Charta Foundation.” Vincent’s ambitions are also tempered; he’s fascinated by “sanitation engineering” but here they are wasting time as “they lolled around Cambridge and wondered whom they should marry.”

happy all the time

Both men have very different relationships with women. Vincent always tends to go for the same type: “vague blond girls who either were on the verge of engagement or had just left their husbands or were recovering from some grand passion or were just about to leave on an extended tour of Europe, or were in fact European and just about to return to their native land.” Guido has a much more difficult time negotiating male-female relationships.

Guido, the poet, obviously has a much more romanticized approach to relationships and he meets Holly in a museum and begins to pursue her. He takes everything seriously while Holly isn’t particularly expressive. Eventually they marry. Vincent, after a serious of lacklustre relationships later meets and marries prickly Misty.

The novel follows these relationships, and as the years pass, both men conclude that their women remain mysterious, unfathomable. Perhaps thirty years ago, Happy All the Time would have appealed more, but I never engaged with the lives of these affluent couples: yes this is a novel about marriage and the complications of male-female relationships, but these four float in a different society: a grating ozone of privilege. I’ve read plenty of novels about the well-to-do, but here I never engaged with the characters, and they never seemed to have much depth and seemed constructed as ‘types’ rather than flesh and blood people–particularly the males Guido and Vincent who are clueless, bland and uninteresting twits. Conclusion: I prefer Colwin’s short stories which are much darker.

Review copy