Customer Reviews

Spectacular Happiness

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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?

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.

I bought this book because I remember the author as a customer in a small art-house video store I used to work in. He always came in with his family, and they all seemed to make the most thoughtful choices for their viewing experience. I knew of his other books, however I gave up the psychology book of the week club after grad school, and never could bring myself to read one of them regardless of my fascination with this family. I was delighted when I saw that he wrote a fiction, and bought it immediately, even though it has been years since then, and I have long since departed from that part of the country.
I have to say, I began to cry upon reading the first passage of the book. In fact it took me several days to get past the first chapter due to the vividness of the emotion I was experiencing through this narrator. The love expressed for his son, and the reluctance to have to explain the events which follow in order to express it, are simply exquisite. This love, for his wife and his son, are what drive him to extrordinary means of expression. An adherence to the spirit of one's life and relationships requires strength, courage, and a perserverance rarely experienced in this world. They must be imagined. Though I like to believe this is what I saw, when I saw the doctor with the two boys and the dog, sometimes the wife, always the daughter, come to rent their weekly films.

Kramer weaves an intricate story of social fabric and personal pain. He can 'out-nuance' the best of them. The protagonist is likable in the tragic way of Hamlet. He deserved better; here he rallies and makes it so, enjoying some honest titillation along the way. But there is no escaping the current underneath this story: things out of balance require radical action. In light of recent events, it is even more poignant. Who of us deserves to make that change happen in a violent way, even if no lives are taken? I am still wrestling with it, and that makes it good.

Simply my favorite book of the summer/fall season. "Spectacular Happiness" is politically alert, and it's also exciting and touching-a great father-son story. The characters are well drawn, even the comic ones, like the psychotherapist who brings the other characters together. Really, a remarkable and original novel.

Simply my favorite book of the summer/fall season. "Spectacular Happiness" is politically alert, and it's also exciting and touching-a great father-son story. The characters are well drawn, even the comic ones, like the psychotherapist who brings the other characters together. Really, a remarkable and original novel.

This book is a great read. As pro reviewers note, Kramer's narrative is well-peppered with all manner of layering, reference and discourse. No doubt, many will love the book just because of that stuff. For me, the pleasure was in the story. Good stories, especially new ones like this one, are hard to find. The mind-movies created in this novel are worth watching and chuckling over. Veterans of the sixties, like myself, immediately recognize where Kramer's protagonist, Chip Samuels is coming from. But, they will be be surprised and amused at where he ends up.

The concept behind this book suddenly seems quaint--a terrorist who takes care not to kill people. If you can bear the awful irony that this concept presents in a world after September 11, 2001, this book is worth the effort it sometimes takes to read.

As other reviewers have noted, Kramer does not hesitate to display his knowledge of other great thinkers. The book modestly does not refer explicitly to the oevure of that great thinker, Peter Kramer (I say this without irony).

Two themes that are addressed at length in his non-fiction books, whether psychoactive drugs change the authentic self (_Listening to Prozac_) and how one makes the decision to leave a major relationship (_Should You Leave?_), dominate this book. A reader who has read Kramer's own thoughts on those subjects will sometimes stifle a smile at the way Kramer's thoughts appear in the minds and mouths of his characters in near-didactic fashion.

I suspect Kramer wrote this book partly to get his ideas before a broader audience. It is worth the effort to view the explication of those ideas, but Kramer's real strength is in the crafting on non-fiction.

I enjoyed this book on two levels, the father's deeply intimate expressions of love and hope for his son and the need of Anarchy/expression in our current society.

What do possesions signify and in blindly succombing to the appeal of Crate and Barrel and Williams Sonoma what does that say about us. To what lengths is one willing to fight for what he believes and to pass down the family tree.

I am not from the cape (Midwest), nor have I ever been there and did find it a bit difficult to relate to the Cape, which is essentially acharacter unto itself. Having said that I do highly reccomend the book.