Fiction

New Canadian fiction of 2005 was almost without exception a pleasure to read. Whether short or extended works, writings cluster into three broad categories: works by women about women's lives; works about specific geographic and historical places; and works of mystery, the latter largely written by men. A smaller category comprises works loosely defined as experimental, fictions designed for smaller reading audiences, perhaps, less driven by commercial or more popular concerns.

The Sad Truth about Happiness is so easy to fall in love with. Anne Giardini's debut novel is a stunning achievement, one of the finest in the 2005 inventory, albeit not without some growing author pains. The talented writer has a knack for drawing you into her character well ahead of where the plot might be going. Her narrator is thirty-something Maggie Selgrin, the matter-of-fact observer who prefers to see herself as the balanced, calming centre in the midst of family neurosis and garden-variety Western chaos. 'In my family,' she begins, 'which is middle-class, white, loving, and mildly claustrophobic, I was the child known for contentedness.'

For quite some time we follow Maggie's close and often wry accounts of her two sisters, the older Janet, who is a bit of prig, and the younger Lucy, who is more petulant and moody. This brood of little women is raised by typically liberal-minded products of the 1960s, the kind who eschewed television for its allegedly pernicious influence and encouraged their children to grow up into themselves with as little interference as possible.

So determined is Maggie to describe others – including her parents, her sisters and their boyfriends, her new roommate, Rebecca, and her various friends with whom she hikes or dines – that you start to wonder if she is deliberately avoiding reflecting on herself. Although she reveals herself to be witty, a consistently shrewd observer of others and the material worlds they shape for themselves, Maggie seems to be almost empty of personal, emotional content. Hovering over her unfolding narration is Rebecca's confident prediction of the date Maggie is going to die, based on an elaborate quiz and taking into account the subject's predilection for risk or deviant behaviours. On one level, the game is as silly as any designed for gullible consumers of women's magazines. On the other, it assumes a menacing and portentous weight, especially in view of Maggie's habitual detachment from people and events. The ultimate prediction hinges on whether the subject declares herself to be happy in the moment she takes the quiz. Tellingly, Rebecca provides the negative response that Maggie avoids altogether. The result is alarming, Maggie's scheduled terminal point being in December of the current year, only a few months hence.

As the paradox of the title suggests, the novel is largely about happiness, where it resides and how one might recognize it. With the sword of Damocles hanging above her head, although scarcely mentioned once the novel starts rolling, Maggie resolves to get happy fast. The second half of the novel does not so much collapse under the weight of improbable events and the kind of Keystone Cop antics for which the term 'zany' strictly applies as swerve maddeningly away from the engrossing first half. Maggie goes from being resolutely single to dating three very different men, kidnapping her sister's baby, and immersing herself in a rural Quebec village where everyone is either breast-feeding or watching someone breast-feeding.

Ultimately the novel returns to a more meditative, reflective prose style, and the work closes with a fair amount of philosophical ruminating on the sad truth about happiness. It would be remiss not to mention that Anne Giardini is the daughter of beloved Canadian novelist Carol Shields, who was dying of cancer while this novel was being written. It would also be remiss to identify this work as a strictly therapeutic reaction to Shields's illness. The Sad Truth about Happiness is a rich and moving work that solidly demonstrates the craft and imagination of its author, from whom one should happily expect more fine fiction.

So many of the stories and...