The Half-Life of Happiness begins "For no reason he could think of, Mike felt terrific," the reader is not reassured. The details accrue with disturbing precision during Mike's walk across Charlottesville's Courthouse Square: clear spring sky, soft breeze, pretty tax specialist, bouncy tap-dance teacher, languorous bookstore clerk, charmingly stuttering woman doctor. Then we glimpse the house he shares with his wife and their two daughters: ramshackle, cluttered, incomplete--"a series of partly assembled kits for family happiness." Clearly, this is one marriage--one family--with trouble in its future. Of course, without trouble, there'd be no novel. Only in this case, the family is so fun, their circle of bright, articulate, bohemian friends so very winning, that watching them careen toward disaster has the same nasty inevitability as a horror movie: one wants to throw up a hand and say, "Wait! Don't go see what was making that noise upstairs!" When trouble arrives, it takes the shape of Bonnie, the new girlfriend of one of their gang. Flirtatious and manipulative, with thin, "gobbly" lips, Bonnie seduces not Mike, surprisingly, but his caustically funny filmmaker wife, Joss. Watching his marriage crumble around him, Mike lets himself be persuaded to enter a congressional race that turns into a humiliating farce, while the couple's two daughters observe their parents' plight with unforgiving clarity. The author of the National Book Award-winning Spartina, Casey brings new energy to what could be a familiar story, and his take on the domestic novel, late 1970s style, is a masterpiece of finely drawn characters and meticulous detail.
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