Happy All the Time

Misty Berkowitz is the novel's great sour delight. Where Vincent expects the world to like him, Misty has decided in advance not to. She is prickly, suspicious of comfort, and armored against exactly the kind of easy affection Vincent offers. When he pursues her, she reads his cheerfulness as complacency and his interest as presumption. She would rather pick a fight than be flattered, and Colwin gives her some of the book's best lines — a running commentary of contempt that slowly, against her own will, softens into something else.

The comedy of their courtship is that Vincent, for all his confidence, has no idea how to win her, because winning is the wrong frame. Misty cannot be conquered; she can only be joined. Every time he tries to be charming, she deflates him. Every time he does something genuinely thoughtful without performing it, she loses a little ground she did not want to lose. Colwin understands that the man who assumes he holds the cards is exactly the man such a woman will refuse, and she lets Misty hold out until Vincent stops trying to have the upper hand.

If Vincent and Misty are the courtship, Guido and Holly are the marriage — and Colwin uses them to ask what happens after the happy ending most novels stop at. Guido marries Holly early, and much of his storyline is about learning to live beside a woman he adores but does not fully comprehend. Holly is composed, private, and self-sufficient in a way that unsettles him. She takes solitary trips. She keeps a portion of herself sealed off. Guido, who wanted a wife to complete him, discovers he has married a whole and separate person instead.

Holly's periodic disappearances — she leaves for weeks at a time, alone, without much explanation — are the closest thing the marriage plot has to a crisis, and Colwin handles them with striking calm. Holly is not cheating; she is not unhappy. She simply requires distance, and she has the nerve to take it. Guido's task is to survive the anxiety this causes him without turning it into an accusation, to let his wife be a mystery rather than demanding she be transparent. The upper hand he keeps reaching for is the reassurance that she needs him as much as he needs her, and Holly quietly declines to hand it over.

Step back from the plot and the novel's real subject comes into focus: Colwin is quietly refusing the machinery that most love stories run on. The standard romance needs an imbalance — someone pursuing, someone pursued; someone with power, someone without — because that imbalance generates suspense. Will she yield? Will he stay? "Happy All the Time" removes the imbalance almost entirely and asks whether anything is left to write about. Colwin's wager is that the more interesting drama has been hiding underneath the power struggle all along, in the daily work of two equals trying to stay happy.

This is why the book can afford to have no upper hand anywhere in it. Vincent does not conquer Misty; Guido does not domesticate Holly; and crucially, the women do not conquer the men either. Nobody is playing to win, because Colwin has decided that in love, winning is the same as losing. The couples who last are the ones who stop keeping score. She replaces the question "who has the power?" with a better one: "can we both be all right at the same time?" — and she treats that as a genuine achievement, not a foregone conclusion.

By the end, both couples are settled — Vincent and Misty arrived at their wary peace, Guido and Holly still working out how much distance their closeness can hold. Nothing has exploded. No one has been ruined or redeemed. The two cousins who set out expecting the world to hand them happiness have gotten it, but not on the terms they imagined; they had to give up the fantasy of holding the upper hand before either woman would come the rest of the way.