HAPPINESS FOREVER

A deeply awkward British woman becomes obsessed with her therapist.

Sylvie, a veterinary nurse in her early 30s, is so deeply uncomfortable in her own skin that she never feels quite sure she’s a person like other people. That inner alienation, along with a bad relationship with a controlling boyfriend she hasn’t fully recovered from, are the reasons she tentatively decides to try therapy. As she explains to the unnamed therapist, “I don’t know…I feel like I shouldn’t be allowed entry, maybe. Like your house is in the world for successful people.” The therapist explains that there is no “successful world” and “unsuccessful world”; there is only one world, and they are both in it. Faith’s debut novel revolves around Sylvie coming to accept that idea. Along the way, she becomes infatuated with the therapist to the extent that she can barely function during the 167 hours each week (she’s counted) she’s not in the office. The obsession revolves not around the therapist’s generic, anodyne insights but around her appearance, upon which Sylvie ruminates continually. In the attempt to figure out “which part of the therapist’s face was driving her crazy,” she creates screenshots of the various features. “She had wanted to work out how small a section of the eyes and the hair could drive her crazy, so she’d zoomed in on these sections, further and further”—at which point she goes into an ecstatic state, “where there is calm and there is certainty and in the certainty there is ecstasy, and for once she is a natural animal, and the world is just as directed, and it is beautiful.” This is the happiest moment in the novel. Meanwhile, Sylvie makes a friend named Chloe who seems to instantly understand her and love her, but this doesn’t have much effect on anything. Similarly, at one point we learn that her mother is dead, but like her brain-damaged dog and her friend Conrad in London, the information sits like a piece of furniture that is rarely used.

A strange and underdeveloped book.