Authors able to give the lie to Tolstoy by rendering joy as a complex substance are few and far between: think Ron Carlson, Laurie Colwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Russo. Yet too often, contemporary literature ignores this. Asked about our defining or most enlightening moments, most of us are as likely to recount happy memories as we are moments of despair. We need look no further than our own lives to recognize the problem we’ll encounter if we preoccupy ourselves with the Tolstoyan “unhappy family” at the expense of the happy ones. It often feels as if the contemporary literary scene has internalized Anna Karenina’s dictum on the nature of happiness-that it is not idiosyncratic, with the implication that it is not worth the kind of careful attention that literature applies to its subjects.
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