Jem Calder's debut novel, I Want You to Be Happy, opens with a droll description of a man and a woman meeting in a bar, trying to make conversation over the music. The specifics are redacted: the woman is 23, the man is 35. The story follows their relationship, with little plot beyond the familiar arc of boy meets girl, they are happy for a while, then they aren't.
What makes the novel fresh is its precise attention to the contemporary environment. The characters live in a world of rental ebikes, vapes, meal-replacement shakes, Slack channels and push notifications. They cyberstalk each other, agonise over text response times, and their age difference is reflected in their texting styles: the older Chuck uses capital letters and punctuation, the younger Joey generally does not.
Calder's prose is factual and affectless, reminiscent of Sally Rooney or Vincenzo Latronico, with a fastidious attention to surfaces that suggests Nicholson Baker or Bret Easton Ellis. He employs a flamboyant flatness, turning nouns into verbs ('axised', 'pendulumed') and using Joycean portmanteaux. The style is a deliberate choice, not a limitation.
Both protagonists are aspiring artists: Joey is a would-be poet working as a barista; Chuck is a would-be novelist working in advertising. Chuck's work-in-progress, 'Paradigms', is as terrible as its title suggests, and the plot hinges on it. Calder is particularly good at describing rain, from 'a low, mizzling rain' to 'faint, aerosol-like rain'.
