Charming is one word for Williams’ prose. It is also life-affirming and written with a turn of phrase that makes the reader want to underline something on every page. I suggest we all buy his books, pushing him into that realm of globally fashionable Irish writers (which he might not care about), but more importantly, sharing with a vast audience his humane and poetic world view ... This is not a book to read for fast-moving developments. It is one to savour, slowly, like the way of life it enshrines. The supporting cast is huge, eccentric, frequently funny ... The dual-time narration means that we are sometimes thrillingly in the moment.
This is a charming, often moving book, enriched by beautifully drawn characters and brilliantly depicted scenes from country life. The narrative unfurls at a languid pace: We drift from Easter services to games of Gaelic football, from pub sessions to house dances. And yet we happily surrender to the gentle rhythms of the drama and the lilting cadences of the prose. Again and again Williams ensures there is musicality in standard descriptions and poetry gilding commonplace truths ... Williams has written a memorable novel that vividly brings alive both a different era and two different male characters — 'knights of first and last loves.'
Williams has painted a lush, wandering portrait of Faha, a village back in time in County Clare, Ireland ... At times, the novel reads almost like an ethnographic study of a village on the cusp of change, calling to mind John Berger’s wonderful fictional trilogy Into Their Labors ... As 21st-century readers, we are invited to lower ourselves into a slower kind of time; we regularly leave the central characters frozen in mid-speech to take a peek at something else ... Where the book’s digressions sometimes bog down are in its more self-reflective moments: Noe the storyteller defending himself against charges (but whose?) of sentimentality and holding forth on the relationship between story and truth, the real and the imagined, and the enriching merits of the arts. Disarmingly, Noe is aware of his own flaws, telling us he was nicknamed 'Know-All' as a child. 'Oh, just shut up and take me back to Faha,' I wanted to interject at times. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t; he’s too sweet a fellow, not to mention my elder (and a fictional character). Be kind, he admonishes the reader directly at one point, and it’s a testament to this bighearted novel that I felt duly chastened, almost like a member of the clan.
The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. Escaping into the pages of This Is Happiness feels as much like time travel as enlightenment. Halfway through, I realized that if I didn’t stop underlining passages, the whole book would be underlined ... If Faha isn’t for everybody, then neither, frankly, is Williams’s novel, delivered in the pensive voice of a man in his 70s recalling his youth. 'This in miniature was the world,' he writes, but that demands a kind of attention and patience that’s increasingly scarce. If you’re in a hurry, hurry along to another book. Williams is engaged in the careful labor of teaching us to hear the subtler melodies drowned out by the din of modern life ... The sweetness of this novel would curdle if it weren’t preserved by a tincture of tragedy that runs through so many of these lives ... Williams’s most affecting skill is his ability to narrate this novel in two registers simultaneously, capturing Noe’s naivete as a teen and his wisdom as an old man ... If you’re a reader of a certain frame of mind, craving a novel of delicate wit laced with rare insight, this, truly, is happiness.
The beauty and power of Irish author Niall Williams’ writing lies in his ability to invest the quotidian with wonder. A truly peerless wordsmith, he even makes descriptions of gleaming white appliances and telephone wire sing. Readers will never forget the scene in which Christy and Noe get drunk in a pub and try to ride home on their bikes, nor Noe’s first kiss in the balcony of a movie house, an experience he endures from the fast-living sister of the girl he has a crush on. The book is hilarious among its many other virtues ... Buy, rent, get your hands on this book somehow and savor every word of it. Its title says it all: Plunging into This Is Happiness is happiness indeed.
not only an understated coming-of-age story and a reckoning with the failures of the past but an entire community, and a whole, now-vanished world. The book is characterized by genuine sentiment, sharp emotional acuity and a boisterous humour keeping it from slipping into arch sentimentality. Williams writes with a musical sensibility, playing individual words as notes in melodic sentences that dip and dance, that are almost impossible not to read aloud ... This is Happiness lives up to its title, with a clear understanding of the unstated correlative: for there to be happiness, there must be sadness.
In the pre-modern idyll fashioned by Mr. Williams, beauty stands out a little more sharply, and feelings are experienced with more directness and intensity ... A meandering, often delightful, rural rhapsody, This Is Happiness recalls only what was sublime about the simple life in Faha. The people are phlegmatic, God-fearing, and generous to the point of martyrdom. There is no small amount of blarney in this. I laughed out loud at Noel’s astonishing claim that 'there was little culture of complaint' during that era, as though glorious grumblers like Sean O’Casey and Patrick Kavanagh had never put pen to paper.
It takes time for Niall Williams to convince you that tourist fodder isn’t what he’s producing in This Is Happiness ... This is how the novel finally earns its setting and sentimentality – it is among these familiar tropes of Irish writing that Noe’s youth happened, so it is here he must inevitably return in old age, 'because, at the end, we all go back to the beginning' ... what becomes clear is that the book is sentimental because...Williams is being faithful to his subject ... The pleasure of this novel lies in its eye for detail. The plot, having been established, then takes a long time to do not very much more ... Williams is excellent on churchgoing, amateur dramatics, parking, the cinema. He lavishes close attention on his parishioners, and finds rich material there. He has a humorist’s eye, and his own fond amusement at the people he writes about shines out through the writing ... The fields of Ireland are very crowded, but by the conclusion of This Is Happiness, you feel Williams has justified adding another book to the herd.
... Williams describes the rain with such rhythm and grace as to render the whole chapter a poem ... While the startling brevity of the first chapter piques the interest, starting with the second chapter, Williams’ prose soars as it draws readers into Faha and introduces the colorful characters who live there ... Faha itself is vibrant and alive ... a contemplative novel that explores a web of themes, resulting in an insightful examination of the shared human experience and a pondering of life’s big questions ... What makes This is Happiness so exceptional is Williams’ gorgeous and astute style, and his brilliant observations on the human condition --- that which is universal and that which is particularly Irish. This book cannot be recommended enough; it is lovely and authentic, heartbreaking yet joyful, immersive and canny, and an absolute delight to read.
... Williams balances carefully between nostalgia and clear-eyed realism ... vivid character sketches abound ... Jumbling chronology and interjecting retrospective opinions as everyone does when remembering the past, Noe warmly evokes a village immersed in the timeless rhythms of nature and the rituals of the Catholic Church, counterpointed by blunt depictions of the bone-deep fatalism of people who know that outsiders view them as backward ... gorgeous flights of lyrical description ... Noe’s musings may occasionally dip into sentimentality, but it’s honest sentiment honestly acquired from his embrace of the full spectrum of human experience — a lesson he learned during the transformative months eloquently captured in Niall Williams’s tender, touching novel.
... [a] long, affectionate, meandering story ... Warm and whimsical, sometimes sorrowful, but always expressed in curlicues of Irish lyricism, this charming book makes varied use of its electrical metaphor, not least to express the flickering pulse of humanity ... A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.
