THE HAPPY COUPLE, by Naoise Dolan
Three years into their relationship, the 20-something Dubliners Celine and Luke still “did not, as a rule, ‘share feelings.’” Celine’s “family never taught her how,” so she measures the partnership by the clutter they’ve accumulated together — it would be so hard to undo. “Marriage will never happen between us,” Luke says to her as they lie in bed after a party. “And that’s not a problem necessarily. It would be silly to stop when it’s going well. But we’re not going to end up together.” One page later, he proposes.
Naoise Dolan’s second novel, “The Happy Couple,” is a study not of love or romance but of the motivating force of self-delusion. When Luke is nowhere to be found at their engagement party, Celine tells herself, “Things are fine, fine, fine.” When he does turn up, there is something “safe” about Luke’s voice, even when she knows he’s lying to her. “What mattered was their potential,” she says, not the “tightness in Celine’s chest.” From Luke, “she wanted nothing, really; hardly anything; just to be known”; what she seeks in marriage is a comforting boundary of self-definition.
“The Happy Couple” hews to the usual contours of what we now call a millennial novel: People in their mid-to-late 20s, mired in indecision and a gloomy sense of possibility, walk at sunrise after a night of cocaine and ask one another things like, “Do you think I could be happy?” Dolan smirks at the persistence of the question in a social milieu — Celine is a professional pianist, Luke does communications for a tech company — with infinite options for fulfillment (both Celine’s and Luke’s romantic entanglements involve multiple genders and little judgment). A supporting cast fills out the millennial-novel universe: Celine’s sister has “only the usual signs of wear: mild nutritional deficiencies, self-diagnosed anxious attachment style, self-diagnosed avoidant attachment style, stiff neck from excessive phone use”; and her ex-girlfriend Maria learns in therapy that “I’m not responsible for how people treat me.”
All the deflection of agency and commitment becomes a bit glib. “It was the very act of choosing that Luke couldn’t stand, and if he ever accidentally made a choice, he’d promptly do something to unchoose it,” Dolan writes. In one of many epistolary-style inserts of drafted groom’s speeches, Luke waxes nostalgic for an ex with whom he “play-acted a different relationship each night,” and “these ersatz partnerships were far more fun than the real one we’d attempted.” More focused on their self-narrated “arc” than they are on their actual lives and the people in them, Dolan’s characters may have far more freedom than Jane Austen’s, but it doesn’t mean they’re any happier.
