Niall Williams, _This Is Happiness_

 NOEL CROWE, known to friends and family as “Noe,” narrates this novel. He is in his late seventies, but he is telling a story from when he was seventeen or eighteen, living with his grandparents in the tiny village of Faha in County Clare, having dropped out of seminary after his first year, no longer sure of his vocation.

Noe entered the seminary because of a promise he made his mother as she was dying...but the story is not about him, really. We do not find out what crisis or erosion of faith occurred that prompted him to leave the seminary, for instance. It is 1958, and electrification is coming to Faha. Faha is about to leave the perpetual chill and perpetual damp of rural western Ireland behind and enter the twentieth century and all the ambiguities of progress. But the novel is not really about that, either, exactly. 

The national powers that be have sent to Faha an agent, one Christy McMahon, to oversee the raising of poles and wires and confirm the cooperation of the Fahaeans. Christy is in his late sixties, a capable and likable man. Christy lodges with Noe’s grandparents and Noe, whom he hires as an assistant. They spend their days preparing for electricity’s advent in Faha and their nights scouting in the region’s pubs hoping to find the legendary fiddler, Junior Crehan.

But the novel is not exactly about that, either, for it turns out that Christy has arranged to have himself sent to Faha mainly because he learns that Annie Mooney lives there—the woman known to Faha as Mrs. Gaffney, the chemist’s widow. Christy left Annie at the altar fifty years ago. He now seeks forgiveness.

That is what the novel is about, I think, but it is really about all of the developments described above and a few more into the bargain—how poles are to be acquired from Finland and how rural telephone operators became disseminators of information, as well as how Noe came to fall in unrequited love with all three of the local doctor’s beautiful daughters and discovered a facility with the fiddle. He never does get back to the seminary.

What the novel may really be about is the peculiar power of the vanished—how that which is gone might remain with us, like music, somehow subtly shaping our being even after it is gone.