People have…permanent smiles on their faces. And suddenly, there’s a shift in the country. The book gets rushed into production and becomes an instant bestseller. He finds THE perfect book that offers an end to all suffering: how to stop smoking, how to lose weight, how to have a phenomenal sex life, etc. The irony, of course, is that one of Edwin’s duties is to find the next big self-improvement book to insure happiness for millions of people until the next book comes along.Īnd Edwin finds it in a slush pile manuscript called “What I Learned on the Mountain” by Tupak Soiree (he’s got a penchant for fun names, doesn’t he?). And, in an odd way, it’s his hatred that makes Edwin happy. Of the many things that plague him are: a once-requited, now cooled, love affair with a co-worker a hyperactive wife who latches on with a June beetle’s grip to the latest self-improvement fads living in a city he truly hates and plodding through a job he hates above all else. Happiness™centers around Edwin de Valu (love the name), a junior editor at a huge American publishing house called Panderic (again, love the name). Because I can read this book and say, “That’s funny and true and….scary.” And now I know what it’s like to be Canadian. With Happiness™, his first foray into fiction, Ferguson takes this honed sarcasm and zeroes in on a target he, at one point in his life, deemed more worthy of his polite vitriol than his homeland: the world of publishing. That’s funny and true and….disturbing.” Taking wit to whetstone, one gets the impression that if Ferguson were reading these works aloud to an American audience, he would stand behind one of his countrymen, poking him with a stick to let him know that he was gently being made fun of, while rolling his eyes at the audience as if to say, “Y’see what I mean? Pushovers.”
As I am not Canadian, I can only imagine the mixture of feelings the Canucks must feel when they consign themselves to his insight, thinking, “Wow…he’s got us pegged. His non-fiction works, How to Be A Canadian and Why I Hate Canadians capture the zeitgeist of what it means to be fervently loyal to your homeland but still be pleasant enough to be thought a total pushover. In his native Canada, Ferguson is perhaps best known as a humorist. If we are to believe Will Ferguson’s novel, Happiness™, it is quite possible to do both. If we are to believe Nietzsche, it is our lot in life to suffer. If we are to believe Aristotle, our telos (or destination) as humans is to attain happiness, having lived a good life.
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