Spectacular Happiness: A Novel [Hardcover]

Peter D. Kramer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 17, 2001

From the author of Listening to Prozac comes a novel of ideas about a man driven to topple the wealth and status obsessed culture around him. From Chekhov to Walker Percy, from William Carlos Williams to Ethan Canin, doctors have turned to fiction with a compelling acuteness of observation. Now Peter Kramer joins their ranks with a sly and provocative novel. Like his international bestseller Listening to Prozac, Spectacular Happiness examines the effects of drug-induced social adaptation; like Should You Leave? it weighs the relative values of intimacy and autonomy. But here Kramer is free to plumb the depths of his imagination and he has done so with spectacular results. Someone has been blowing up bayfront trophy homes on Cape Cod and doing a meticulous job of it. Chip Samuels has been fingered as the prime suspect. He seems an odd choice: a junior college English teacher and part-time handyman, he is a devoted friend, husband and father. But he did it, all right out of loyalty to a friend and to the radical ideals he and his wife once shared. Pursued by the FBI and a voracious media, Chip has limited time in which to explain himself to his estranged son and rescue his wife from her medicated conformity. His only way out may be to turn his notoriety into celebrity - to exploit 'the society of the spectacle.'

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When is a bomb not a bomb? When it's a novel, of course. Peter D. Kramer's Spectacular Happiness is an intellectual blitzkrieg of a book, setting off depth charges of meaning long after its pages are closed. Kramer's protagonist, Chip Samuels, is the sort of man for whom the term mild-mannered seems to have been coined: college teacher, part-time carpenter, ambivalent anarchist, noncustodial father of a dearly loved son. When someone begins blowing up beachfront homes in his Cape Cod hometown, Samuels is the last person anyone should suspect--and yet the bombing campaign is his personal form of redemption, the work of an ex-radical finally coming into his own. Ironically, the resulting media frenzy turns him into the last thing any right-thinking radical would wish to become: a celebrity, a spokesperson, a rich man, an insider.

Samuels's story takes the shape of an extended journal written for his absentee son. It's a risky form for a novel, both introspective and deliberate, and for the first third of the book its discursive style can be a challenge to read. Kramer is the psychiatrist author of the bestselling Listening to Prozac, and his first novel often proceeds according to the rhythms of nonfiction: light on scene and dialogue, heavy on exposition and allusion. He seems never to have met a book he didn't like, and he's not at all afraid to wear his learning on his sleeve, repeatedly citing Marx, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Dickens, Thoreau, and Walter Benjamin. Fortunately, it's all in the service of character, and not quite as intimidating as it sounds.

Ultimately, Samuels has the temperament not of a terrorist but of an artist. He finds Marx inferior to Dickens as a thinker, and describes the bombings as a form of personal expression, reflecting his own quiet fastidiousness and keen sense of the absurd. But what are the moral implications of his actions? We're left to work that one out for ourselves, with not even a crazed manifesto to point us in the right direction: "I have never intended to impose political solutions on my neighbors. I have hoped to say at most, We know the dilemma we are in, the human dilemma." The human dilemma is, of course, the territory of both the psychiatrist and the novelist. And in his first foray into fiction, Kramer asks questions he can't answer and raises issues he won't resolve--a kind of "silent therapy" for a culture that could use some time on the couch. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Kramer's chief claim to fame to date is his passionate anti-Prozac treatise (Listening to Prozac), but this debut novel about a disgruntled Cape Cod teacher who becomes an ecoterrorist should help earn him a serious literary audience as well. Kramer's protagonist is Chip Samuels, a thoughtful, passionate community college teacher who becomes increasingly disgruntled as he underachieves in midlife, his marriage falls apart, he loses his beloved son and he sees society becoming increasingly driven by meaningless consumption. He expresses his dissatisfaction by teaming up with an old lover in a plot to blow up expensive beach houses as a protest against the privileges of wealth and the degradation of the environment, starting with the home of a local mafioso whom they also manage to implicate in the plot. But Samuels avoids the tragic fate his actions seem to foreshadow when the media picks up his story and, in a bizarre commentary on the cult of celebrity, turns him into a counterculture hero, leading him into a new life as a network talking head. The combination of the near-total absence of dialogue and an extremely introspective approach makes the first half of this novel a rather tough go, but once Kramer gets his story in gear he proves to be an extremely literate author as he throws himself into the task of creating a very memorable protagonist who becomes both hero and antihero. The depth, quality and ambition of Kramer's prose will surprise those expecting a superficial crossover effort. This novel will score high on reviewers' and readers' checklists. (July)Forecast: Kramer's fame will give this novel instant exposure, but it may cause some readers to dismiss the book, too. Respectful reviews will be required to tilt the balance. If they materialize, sales potential is high, helped by a five-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (July 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684864304
• ISBN-13: 978-0684864303
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,742,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a beach novel for the mind, July 3, 2001

By 

Diana Muir "Diana Muir" (Newton, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spectacular Happiness: A Novel (Hardcover)

There is everything to like in this novel.

First there is Kramer's love of words. Perhaps we should not be surprised that a Harvard grad who spent two years reading literature at Oxford before going on to medical school should use the language with mastery. If not surprised, then, we are delighted. Delighted by his sensitivity to word and nuance, by the way characters and plot lines from classic novels are woven in, and by meeting fragments from the work of favorite poets worked seamlessly into the text.

Insight into time and place is marvelous, the beach-plum and cedar-shingled Cape of the fifties and the trophy homes of the New England shore in the new millenium.

Any graying SUV owners plagued by the nagging suspicion that they may have been on to something real in their barefoot, bell-bottomed, anti-materialist salad days will find validation in Kramer's vision.

Frustrated environmentalists who know that the ecosystem is dying around us while George W. fiddles, will find catharsis.

Most of all, however, we recognize ourselves in the pages of Spectacular Happiness. Kramer has a knowing finger on the pulse of our celebrity-obsessed, posession-conscious, tummy-tucked culture in a novel for our times.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars is this what we're really like?, August 6, 2001

By 

Philip Greenspun (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spectacular Happiness: A Novel (Hardcover)

I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were built in the 1960s. They lie low against the forested hills. Many of the 1960s houses can barely be seen from the street, despite the quarter-acre lot sizes and the fact that most of the houses are 4-bedroom affairs. Returning to this neighbor (Mohican Hills) today, one's senses are assaulted by the 1990s houses. The builders razed the trees and pushed the foyer roof as high as possible. The new houses have perhaps twice the interior space as the old ones but 10 times the visual impact. Kramer's well-written, smoothly flowing book is about the same phenomenon on Cape Cod and how a representative couple of old-style Cape residents deal with it.

Caveat: It feels as though the psychiatrist author mined his patients' collective neuroses to build the characters in this book. This gives the characters a rich texture but it also is a bit scary. Is this what we (Americans) are really like? Are we all this damaged?

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly Gripping, January 7, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Spectacular Happiness: A Novel (Hardcover)

There is some very good writing in Peter Kramer's first novel. Having read all his non-fiction, I approached Spectacular Happiness with trepidation; how many contemporary physicians have been able to produce a fictional work that actually speaks to a wider reading audience? Well Peter D. Kramer has. Full of pathos, dark musings, original ideas and well-developed characterizations, I could barely put it down. I'm not objective: I love the Cape, which is a major character in the book, but I am a critical reader and found this book impressive -- not just as a "first stab" at fiction, but as an intelligent and original novel, with important things to say about the way we live and the struggles of our inner lives. I highly recommend it.