Customer Reviews

The Half-life of Happiness

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For those wanting an escape from legal potboilers, books about horses and medical thrillers, here is a great summer read that may actually linger in your mind awhile. Reminiscent of Updike's Rabbit novels, Casey's Half-Life of Happiness is a richly textured, very moving account of the breakup of a marriage set against the backdrop of a fascinating Congressional election.

The characters come alive in the skilled hands of John Casey, who describes the couple's boredom, their inability to communicate as their world crumbles around them, and the frustrations felt by liberal Democrat lawyer Mike Riordan as he slips into middle age and is coaxed into a seemingly futile bid to run for Congress.

The story is one about relationships- at its core the novel deals with the breakup of Mike and Joss, but it works on so many more levels including the strained relationship between sisters Edith and Nora, as well as numerous effective passages involving the couple's friends, colleagues, political opponents, etc. The narrative focus changes frequently, but never in such a fashion as to disrupt the continuity of the plot. Overall, a very intelligent, moving novel of a family crisis written with humor, compassion and attention to detail.

Casey reveals characters that breath. He ask the reader to work on knowing the meaninging behind the motivations of his characters. I found myself "dog-earing" many pages and reading sections over again as I connected to the narrative. I found The Half-Life of Happiness to be a wonderful companion to the complexities of this holiday season. This book will challenge you to slow down and look at the life around you from many different narratives. You will see yourself, your family and your friends in this powerful piece of work. Enjoy and watch the compassion in you grow with each chapter.

John Casey had a knack for capturing emotions through dialog or action. This is good for most of his characters. However, its bothersome for the wife/mother, Joss.

Joss (a film-maker) is married to Mike (a lawyer) and they have two daughters, and live in Charlottesville with many odd charcaters hanging around. Their life is turned updside down when Joss falls for a girl named Bonnie and Mike copes with the new arrangement by running for Congress and sleeping with his campaign aides.

There are plenty twists and turns in the plot and the characters are fun and interesting. However I could not find one reason to want Joss to ever appear on any page. She's as pleasant as poison ivy and just as much an itch. She lives to argue and argues to live. Her films are seen by very few and understood by even fewer. She seems to believe that Mike is just as much at fault for her relationship with Bonnie. Yeah, right.

I do think the book is enjoyable and recommend it. I just wish I could have offered four stars. Oh, Joss.

An excellent novel about what it is like to be a man or a woman in this world. The effects that your family and friends have on you and your family and friends. Nothing is forced, the plotting is excellent and the writing is graceful, superb and flawless. Casey doesn't leave you stranded. The ending is thoughtful and emotional. For every action there is a reaction. I was very moved. Very.

I loved this book. Near the end I had to slow down to keep it from ending. This is a full and beautiful account of a family made up of people who are all quite appealing yet human, with all the weaknesses that humanity entails. It is the story of Mike Reardon's journey through the break-up of his marriage and the indignities of a political campaign. The point of view shifts between an omniscient narrator reporting events as they happened in the 1970s and the first-person account of Edith, Mike's somewhat embittered daughter, looking back from the present. This technique produces a rich and often humorous point/counterpoint portrayal of events.

The denouement, built around a final scene in which the daughters, Edith and Nora, drive to a family reunion attended by both their father and mother, took my breath away. I closed the book, but I didn't want to let go.

Thank you, John Casey.

In this novel about a marriage falling apart, Casey spends an enormous amount of time with each character, describing his or her feelings and thoughts in clear detail. I felt like I really knew each of them, yet I didn't feel suffocated by being in the character's head too long. This works well because besides the husband and wife point of view, Casey gives us their older daughter as a narrator looking back on her childhood during the time of the divorce. Plenty of plot, too, that kept me reading. Altogether this book was an excellent balance of insightful fiction, family drama and local color all done by a highly talented writer. I enjoyed his other books, too, and look forward to the next.

John Casey's "The Half-life of Happiness" was a wonderful read. I'd been waiting patiently for the next book since "Spartina" and was glad that it was a big, richly detailed examination of family, and the nature of love in all its good and bad ways. I particularly enjoyed the choice of utilizing the children's voices as sort of a Greek chorus commenting upon the action and people who fill the story. Of course, the ending was particularly insightful and extremely emotional after coming through these people's travails so richly because of the quality of Mr. Casey's writing.

I found this book to be disappointing on all fronts. Try as I might, I could not empathize with even one character, and I found the style to be somewhat rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness. Are we supposed to feel compassion for Mike because of the breakdown of his marriage? In a book in which all the adults seem to be egomaniacal and some even cruel, it is difficult to even like anyone let alone sympathize with them, except perhaps the children who get front row seats to their parents' self-destruction. I found the writing style of this book somewhat monotonous. More often than not, we read of an incident in Mike's life from his point of view; then we hear it re-hashed from the point of view of another character; years later, it gets another re-telling from his grown daughters. If Mike were more interesting, or his actions less self-serving, this might warrant a closer look. But who cares if his post-divorce girlfriend took advantage of him? Or if he mouthed off more than he should have? The only characters who were marginally sympathetic were neighbors Edmund and Evelyn, who moved away and inexplicably never showed up in the book again. Not angst-ridden enough, I guess.

What a brilliant book! I sat with a highlighter to capture all of Casey's wonderful insights and wisdom about men, women, family, and human interaction. The characters really come alive, and the reader is immediately drawn into this interesting, completely believable world. Casey writes with great sensitivity about people's complex emotions regarding their spouses, friends, family ... even their pets! And despite it being more than 500 pages, I dreaded seeing this book end. I just hope John Casey is hard at work on his next masterpiece.

On my list of top ten all-time favorite books is The Half-Life of Happiness by John Casey. It's a novel about a marriage and a family. One of my favorite passages is:

"Garden tools, canoe paddles and fishing gear, their daughters' toys and sports equipment, Joss' movie gear...the girls' wardrobes....All these things spilled from closets and racks and chests so that the whole house was a series of partly assembled kits for family happiness. The house, like their marriage, was a place for storing years that weren't ever quite what was planned but which he believed might still be made whole by someone turning up with the missing piece."