About the Book
The absurdity and distortion of reality that made Brock Clarke's previous two novels so outrageously funny and yet so moving are on full display in his newest offering, The Happiest People in the World. Adapting the format of the political thriller and subverting it to tell his story of innocence corrupted, Clarke has delivered a biting and controversial satire on the American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it. The Happiest People in the World is a spy novel like no other spy novel. It's also a send-up of American culture, and in particular the constant pursuit of individual happiness of the kind that is attainable only at the expense of others. In exploring the contradictions and pitfalls of our national obsession with both "freedom" and "security," the novel shows us how we constantly subvert our own good intentions--as husbands and wives, as children and parents, as students and teachers, as believers in art and believers in God, as citizens of America and citizens of the world.
About the Author :
Brock Clarke is the author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, which was a national bestseller and has appeared in a dozen foreign editions, as well as several other books. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College.
Adam Black is a narrator of audiobooks known for his readings of My Name is Russel Fink, The Well, and Washed and Waiting, among others.
Review :
"[A] dark and funny satire...The ridiculous confusion of infidelities, secret identities, and double-crosses that plays out reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people."
-- "Wall Street Journal"
"[Clarke has] success in dreaming up oddball originals that have instant appeal."
-- "New York Times"
"A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan's Heroes, full of authorial cartwheels of comedy and profundity."
-- "GQ"
"A whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption...Clarke dazzles with a dizzying study in extremes, cruising at warp speed between bleak and optimistic, laugh-out-loud funny and unbearable sadness. His comedy of errors is impossible to put down."
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
"Adam Black's narration is like having a high-energy drink after a couple of espressos. His rapid, angst-ridden pace captures the bewilderment Jens, newly christened Henry Larsen, feels when he's installed as a high school guidance counselor in Broomeville, New York. Talk about culture shock! In this novel filled with wonderfully bizarre characters, Shakespearean dilemmas, and hilarious, if bloody, outcomes, Black's wicked narration and Brock Clarke's no-holds-barred wackiness prove laugh-out-loud funny."
-- "AudioFile"
"Brock Clarke has long been one of my favorite writers, and this novel, good lord, is his best one yet. In The Happiest People in the World, Clarke portrays, with terrifying accuracy, the lives of people who constantly ruin things without ever quite understanding why or how, which eventually gives way to a strange kind of invulnerability. There is no writer who does this better than him, creating that wonderful mixture of unexpected, sharp comedy and genuine empathy. The Danes may be the happiest people in the world, but you can easily join those ranks by simply reading this amazing book."
-- "Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang"
"Brock Clarke's hilarious new novel starts out in rural Denmark, then takes us someplace really foreign and utterly weird: upstate New York. The parallel universe Clarke creates there is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder."
-- "Richard Russo, New York Times bestselling author of The Old Cape Magic"
"If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird."
-- "Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia"
"It's like what might have come to be had the Coen brothers collaborated with the Three Stooges: an energetic exercise in the incompatible mediums of dark humor and slapstick, in which nobody ever really knows what the hell is going on, the reader included...Clarke's work can be seen as a continuing investigation into American haplessness; his characters are forever powerless against their own worst impulses and against the vicissitudes of fate."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And he's done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful he's out there--watching our every move."
-- "Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories "
"Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world."
-- "Edith Pearlman, author of Binocular Vision"
"The funniest and smartest novel I have read in years. 'Yes!' I thought, as I read these pages. 'That's how you write a good book.'"
-- "Hannah Tinti, author The Good Thief"
