Spectacular Happiness

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.'

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