Niall WilliamsCritiques

Beautiful in the telling, but slow. Strong voice and setting and description but very little plot thus far (read to p. 112)

Quotes

The known world was not so circumscribed then nor knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding....There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening. (4)

You don't see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you've been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still... (35)

Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them. That's the best I can say. It can't be explained, only felt. (41)

In a lifetime there's more than one doorway. Even as I was running I think I knew this was one. (48)

You could hardly credit it was the same world you were in yesterday. (69)

The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. (82)

Oh what a lovely book! I enjoyed the writing so much that it makes me wistful that I cannot create such beautiful writing.

No one remembers when the rain began in Faha, but now it is stopping. This small Irish community
is also on the brink of something new - electricity.
The story is told by Noel Crowe, a 17 year old who is entranced by Christy and his story of love and loss. After meeting Christy, Noel also falls in and out of love.
This is a wonderful story and I enjoyed every moment of it.

This is a beautifully written book, with dense, creative, and descriptive language. The language was so beautiful that I sometimes missed the plot, which was special as well. It took a lot of concentration to read this and a quiet space to read.

The plot revolves around a small town in Ireland where the rain stops and electricity comes. With it, an older man named Christy shows up in town and befriends a young man, Noe. It's slowly revealed that Christy has come to Faha to make amends with a woman that he left at the altar decades ago. At the same time, Noe, who lives with his grandparents, is coming into adulthood. He's struggling with his feelings about the church, falling in love, and remembering the death of his mother.

I really loved this novel and will read more by Niall Williams when I am in the mood for a book that is insightful, beautifully written, and a bit slower paced.

"... I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is Happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it."

Yes indeed this is Happiness! Such a wonderful book! Dermot Crowley is a fabulous narrator. I will look for anything he does. Niall Williams use of language is so wonderful! I treasure certain phrases I heard here. I've set my husband to listening to this. I hope I will be able to overhear sometimes. I really could pick this up anywhere and just listen. Really extraordinary storyteller! Made me laugh and brought me to tears. I loved these characters. Touched my heart in so many ways. I highly recommend it!

This is Happiness is my idea of a perfect novel - small town life and a coming of age story, with gorgeous writing and wonderful characters. I felt transported through Williams’ writing, both with the incredible world-building (you can feel the history of Faha) and through Noe’s character (it reminded me what it felt like to be young and insecure). I underlined so many passages and took so many notes - I can absolutely see myself coming back to this novel again and again.

HAPPINESS offers an enjoyable slow moving plot until the nose thing -
thereafter, just skimmed to the end.

Absolutely beautiful writing!!!

This book is, on the surface, about change: "the electricity" is coming to a small town in Ireland; Noe, at 17, has left the seminary and falls in love for the first time; Christy is nearing 70 and trying to correct past wrongs. Mostly, though, this book is a testament to the power of storytelling. Noe learns from Christy's stories. Those same stories allow a severed connection to rekindle. And the reader, too, gets lost in the storytelling. A calm, gentle, but powerful story.½

After deciding to leave the seminary, Noel comes to the small Irish town of Faha to live with his grandparents. At just seventeen Noe, as he is called, is trying to find his way in the world while coping with loss. The story is told by a much older Noe, reflecting on a formative period in his life.

Noe’s grandparents provide just the security he needs, and their new lodger Christy takes Noe under his wing as well. Christy is in Faha as part of a crew preparing the area for electrical service, but he also has a secret objective to reconnect with a woman he was once romantically involved with. Once Noe discovers this, he does what he can to bring about their reunion while also experiencing his own share of mishaps and encounters with the opposite sex.

This novel is beautifully written. Noe’s story made me smile and laugh occasionally; Christy’s brought tears to my eyes, and his lasting impact on Noe was heartwarming. Niall Williams paints a vivid picture of life in rural Ireland with beautiful prose that makes you want to read everything he’s ever written.½

"O, now!" One of the most pleasurable books I've read in some time. Set in Ireland in the mid 20th century in a town without electricity, Faha has an electricity all its own in the narrator's storytelling. Read it slowly to savor the language and the subtle (at times, laugh-out-loud) humor. Happiness is reading this book and reflecting on the insights of an old man.

Copyediting quibble. Most of the time references to the town are spelled Fahaean, but in three or four spots, it was Fahean.

A beautifully written, lyrical Irish novel. Noel Crowe, in his 70s residing now in America, is looking back on a period of his early life, aged 17, and living with his grandparents in the small rural parish of Faha having dropped out of seminary. He arrives as the parish is just about to be connected 'with the electricity' and the arrival of Christy McMahon who changes his life.

Vividly drawn, with a breadth of characters and stories, a sense of place, music, and spoonful of tragi-comedy.½

Rating this 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. My book group just finished this novel (not everyone read the entire book, some skimmed and some didn’t even do that) and we agreed that the book’s description should have included a warning – “This book begins slowly, and the middle is also plodding. There’s not much of a plot. The writing is poetic, but the sentences are long and meandering.” The sentence below is a good description of the book and a perfect example of the author’s Irish storytelling style:

“And because in Faha, like in all country places time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone else’s time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human beings had to be long, not to say convoluted, had to be so long that they wouldn’t and in fact, couldn’t be finished this side of the grave, and only for the first gone out and the birds of dawn singing might be continuing still.”

It took too many pages of reading to get to know and care about the characters. The last 50 pages of the novel are touching and warmhearted, which could account for those reviewers who called the entire tome “delightful,” “hilarious,” and “breathtaking.”

So for those, like me, who read all 380 pages of this lyrically written coming-of-age novel written like a memoir, adjust your expectations. Plan to travel back in time to a small Irish village in the late 1950s, just before their leap into the modern world via electricity and just after the town gets its first telephone (one for the entire village). Experience first love, unrequited love, and an enduring long-time married relationship. While this is a quiet book that takes its time engaging most readers, the threadbare plot is finally discernable at the conclusion.

This book generated a stimulating discussion in our book group, and no one who read it felt that they had wasted their time.

During a mid-century spring marked by unprecedented sunshine, things are changing in the wee village of Faha, County Clare. The electricity is coming in, and the Crowes are on the telephone now. Young Noel Crowe has abandoned Dublin as well as his seminary studies and is struggling to find himself in his grandparents' rural outpost. "Faha was no more nor less than any other place. If you could find it, you'd be on your way somewhere else."

Often accompanied on a rickety bicycle by his grandmother's boarder Christy, an agent of the electric company, Noel spends many evenings seeking the music of a wandering fiddle player widely touted as the finest that ever bowed a string. "Once he heard a tune it never left him...In time Junior Crehan carried so much music in him he became a one-man repository...in whose playing was the playing of all those before him on into the mists of the long ago."

Love is in the air, but having trouble finding where to settle. Noel falls, in rapid sequence, for each of the three daughters of the local doctor, simultaneously attempting to mend a decades-old rift between his new friend Christy and the woman he left at the altar.

The novel proceeds at the unhasty pace of a one-horse buggy, and you seriously need to slow down and let it do so. In the hands of an Irish master, the English language sheds all its Anglo-Saxon clunkery, and becomes the music you didn't know you were seeking yourself.

"You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for. We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn't endure the certainty of suffering. That's how it seems to me."

Give yourself a gift; read this one without giving a thought to when you will finish or what you will read next.½

What a lovely written book about miracles, faith, angels, love, and magic! Set on the west coast of Ireland and Dublin, Mr. Williams interweaves the stories of Isabel Gore and Nicholas Coughlan. Isabel lives on an island off Galway, the daughter of a poet/teacher and the most beautiful girl on the island, but she is full of guilt for her musical brother's lapse into illness. Nicholas is the son of a civil servant in Dublin who heard the commandment of God to leave his depressed wife and young son in the summers to tramp about the west coast to paint.
The writing is exquisite:
“The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.”
My only quibble is that I thought the ending was a bit rushed, but maybe that's because I wanted the book to go on. It's a lovely story that evokes the best of Ireland.

Ruth Swain is confined to bed upstairs in her childhood home, surrounded by her father’s extensive book collection. She is on a journey to read all of his books, while also discovering more about her father and his family history. This novel is Ruth’s way of documenting her personal journey. While she begins several generations earlier, the narrative is fluid and periodically shifts to present-day events, especially those pertaining to Ruth’s illness.

Ruth’s paternal line was made up of headstrong men, battling a legacy of unreasonably high standards but perpetuating those standards into the next generation. That is, except for Ruth’s father Virgil. Her story of Virgil’s early life, marriage to her mother Mary, and a father’s deep love for his family. But their lives are also ones of social awkwardness, economic hardship, and tragedy. Details unfold very slowly, often alluded to more than explicitly stated, generating an emotional tension that continues to build until its dramatic release and moving resolution.

This novel is meticulously crafted and beautifully written. Highly recommended.½

I wish I could give this six stars. Will read again.

Just before Easter, in Faha, a small town in county Clare, two events take place, momentous for rural Ireland in 1957: It stops raining, and Father Coffey announces that electricity is coming.

Equally important to seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe, who’s visiting his grandparents from Dublin — fleeing his decision to leave the seminary —Christy McMahon arrives to stay as a boarder. That draws keen interest in Faha, as newcomers do. However, Christy’s a wise, kind-hearted man in his sixties who looks as if he’s been around the world, which impresses Noel even more and offers precisely what he needs, a mentor who has plenty to teach but a diffident manner in imparting it. From this premise comes an unusual coming-of-age novel.

For the first thirty pages, you may think that there’s no story here, even granting Williams his extraordinary prose (pick a page; you’ll find something quotable), so that This Is Happiness promises to be a slog. And I’ll admit, for a while, every time I put the book down, I kept asking myself why I continued reading. Prose alone can’t carry me through a narrative; I don’t care who’s writing it.

But every time I picked the book up again, I got lost in the storytelling, and now I feel foolish for having doubted. Plenty happens in this novel, only in small moments. But as our narrator, now grown old, observes of Faha and what he learned there, “Here’s the thing life teaches you: sometimes the truth can only be reached by exaggeration.”

So it is that the uncommon sunshine affects Faha in baroque ways; the erection of poles to string electrical wires creates outlandish drama; and Christy’s arrival to work for the electric company has another, secret motive behind it. Even Father Coffey’s position as the new, young priest in town alters the path of life, though the difference between him and his elder predecessor may seem small, at first. Legions of stories crop up to explain all these mysteries; everyone in town has a different opinion, and therefore a different version to share. Life’s fuller that way.

Consequently, This Is Happiness explores the power of storytelling and how a boy receives life lessons from it; in the process, the narrative sings an elegy to life gone by, without making judgments. The advent of the new, as with electricity and a younger man in the pulpit, will change Faha forever. But the alteration isn’t evil, it’s just life.

Noel will change too. He goes by Noe, a nice descriptive touch for a young man who’s not fully formed and well aware of it; he’s also a terrific narrator. He knows everyone’s flaws, including his own — the latter perhaps too much to expect from a seventeen-year-old, even in the confusion of retrospect — but he sees with clear eye, warm heart, and empathy for all.

But don’t assume the unhurried pace or repetition of phrases implies that nothing moves in Faha. Things travel great distances, in fact, but in minds and hopes, the thwarting of desires and dreams, the accommodation to that, and in music (another important presence), and laughter, the necessary curative.

To be sure, This Is Happiness follows a rhythm unusual in modern life, partly because Faha isn’t modern, as we’d define it. But if you can accept that rhythm for what it is, you’ll be richly rewarded.

Setting aside my extreme appreciation of most things Irish: literature, language, music, landscape, culture, please believe me that you do not want to miss Niall Williams's This is Happiness. Niall Williams's This is Happiness offers irresistible story-telling.

It is 1958, electricity is coming to ever-rainy Faha in County Clare, in the west of Ireland. Noe Crowe is rusticating at his grandparents’ house having found his vocation for the priesthood faltering. Just before the electric men arrive, the rain stops and along comes Christy, to stay as a lodger as the Crowes senior have the rare telephone. He is one of the men involved in electrification but Noe immediately intuits that Christy is not only different but here on a mission. Gradually Christy's secret and his purpose emerge and intertwine with Noe's own efforts to figure himself out at least enough to know what direction to move in with his life. The novel is so rewarding I've said enough. Read it.

A sub-theme in the novel is music: As Noe begins to play the fiddle, Christy and Noe bicycle around the region in the hopes of happening upon Junior Crehan playing at a session or dance. If you do read the novel, be sure to go to your browser and look up Junior Crehan, one of County Clare's most wonderful composers and fiddlers of the last century and be sure also to go listen on youtube or wherever to a bit of his music, and listen to him talk about his life. Look up too, the Irish words that pop up here and there in the text.

At one moment, the narrator, Noe (pronounced No, 'short' for Noel--one of countless sly language moments as the Irish language itself contains no word for 'No' -- or 'Yes' for that matter) watches his grandfather standing quietly for hours in his upper field on the small family farm in the village of Faha in Clare, just . . . doing what looks like nothing, just looking about. Subtly but forcefully Williams quietly demonstrates as well what having electricity, that mysterious and now essential enabler of how we live now, will change everything: what will be gained and what will be lost.

The novel is so rich in detail, in humor, so emotionally engaging, so rewarding I've said enough. Read it. *****

Also don't miss History of the Rain which was a best book for me a few years back.

Absolutely delightful.

During Holy Week of 1958 three events launch change that will forever change the west country town of Faha in Ireland. The ever present rain has stopped. Seventeen year old Noe Crowe has arrived to live with his grandparents after leaving the seminary in order to discover what it is to live a meaningful life. And electricity is coming to Faha.

This is both a coming of age story for Noe, as well as a story about community and redemption. It is Irish prose that is circuitous, and compassionate to the characters. There is a story of redemption for Christy, a man in his 60's who is intent on making amends for the wrongs in his past, including leaving a bride at the altar. And the arrival of electricity is a metaphor for the current of love the runs through Faha.

I don't think the style of writing will appeal to everyone. But if you like good Irish literature, here's a story for you.½

Nineteen year old Ruth Swain lies in her top floor bed dying of a blood disorder. As this is set in Faha in County Cork, Ireland, the rain comes incessantly down.

She is surrounded by thousands of volumes of books which her father, a not very successful poet, accumulated over the course of his life.

She contemplates her family history – how her grandfather acquired this 12 acre impossibly unsuccessful farmland in an attempt to impress his father – what the blurb on the back of the book calls the “ dogged pursuit of the Swains' Impossible Standard and forever falling just short”. Father and grandfather became obscessed salmon fisherman and the sport is also featured heavily.

I really wanted to like this book, but I found it slow and heavy. Death, rain, and never measuring up do not make a read to tackle if you are struggling within yourself as you read this. I could appreciate the lovely writing and characterizations. I will try another of Mr. Williams’ books, but can’t see myself rereading this one. 3.5 stars½

Now this is what I recognise as Irish writing. What is evident in his writing is that it comes from a deep love for his people and his country. He writes of their idiosyncracies with affection and acceptance. His writing is peopled with wonderfully drawn characters and vivid rural images. So yes it is a character driven novel but also a love story, not only between man and woman but between friends, grandparents and community.½

This mispronunciations are putting me off, not going to finish