The Happiest People in the World: A Novel
(eBook)

"[A] dark and funny satire . . . Infidelities, secret identities and double-crosses . . . Reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people." -The Wall Street Journal Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York--there you have an idea of Brock Clarke's new novel. Filled with wonder and anger in almost equal parts,The Happiest People in the World is a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of paranoia and the all-American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it. "A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan's Heroes, full of authorial cartwheels of comedy and profundity." -GQ "The Happiest People in the World begins with a raucous bar scene featuring party streamers, smoke, prone bodies, spilled fluids and a stuffed moose with a surveillance camera in its left eye . . . [Clarke has] success in dreaming up oddball originals that have instant appeal." -Janet Maslin, The New York Times "[Clarke] creates books that taste like delicious cuts of absurdity marbled with erudition." -The Washington Post "A whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption . . . His comedy of errors is impossible to put down." -Publishers Weekly, starred review "A darkly hilarious novel . . . The writing is clever, the dialogue snappy and understated, and the effect is as pleasantly unsettling as anything Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ever wrote." -The Portland Sun "A zany and fast-paced book that explores the myriad ways people of all nations make themselves and others unhappy." -Chicago Tribune, Printer's Row "Ranks among the funniest and most relevant social satires I've read . . . It might just make you the happiest reader in the world." -The Dallas Morning News Brock Clarke is an award-winning author of seven previous works of fiction, including the bestselling An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. He lives in Maine, and teaches at Bowdoin College. "The funniest and smartest novel I have read in years." -Hannah Tinti, author The Good Thief "This novel, good lord, is his best one yet. Brock Clarke portrays, with terrifying accuracy, the lives of people who constantly ruin things without ever quite understanding why or how, which eventually gives way to a strange kind of invulnerability. There is no writer who does this better than he does, creating that wonderful mixture of unexpected, sharp comedy and genuine empathy. The Danes may be the happiest people in the world, but you can easily join those ranks simply by reading this amazing book." -Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang "If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird." -Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia "Brock Clarke's hilarious new novel starts out in rural Denmark, then takes us someplace really foreign and utterly weird: upstate New York. The parallel universe Clarke creates there is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder." -Richard Russo, author of Elsewhere "Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world." -Edith Pearlman, auhor of Binocular Vision "Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean loo