Memoirs tend to follow certain conventions. Like the best fiction, they inform readers on how to navigate tricky territory like illness, death, or working at the Circle K. Readers live with the author through his struggles, cheering him on when things look up. By the end of the book, both author and reader have changed in some way—all have learned something from this shared experience. If the author isn’t sympathetic at the beginning, his situation and internal dialogue will eventually befriend readers. Happy doesn’t quite follow this convention. Author Alex Lemon makes very little attempt to elicit sympathy in this story of his recurrent strokes while in college and rarely offers any insight to his psyche.
College athlete Lemon is called “Happy” by his friends and baseball teammates at Macalester College. He’s one of those “live hard, play hard” types readers are familiar with from TV dramas. He gets sweaty at practice, ingests lots of drugs and booze, leaves his papers until the last minute, and cheats on his girlfriends. He’s pretty much the standard college jerk. The twist comes when Happy begins to vomit and black out more than usual. After ignoring these neurological symptoms for a while, he’s diagnosed with a stroke. Lemon intersperses these chapters with stories from his childhood, sharing a dark secret about being molested as a child. He believes the molestation has doomed him to being a “monster.” Supposedly the stroke and the molestation are supposed to excuse his obnoxious behavior, but he fails to understand that his self-awareness should have freed him from this sentence.
Lemon has another stroke and decides to opt for surgery, though it’s never made clear to the reader what the surgery is going to do. At this point, readers become privy to more of his thoughts, but this won’t make him any friends. He’s angry about rehab, and that’s understandable. He’s an athletic teenager in a wheelchair, and that can’t be fun. But Happy begins to relish the suffering of others in rehab who are worse off than he is. He even gets giddy when they don’t show up, secretly reveling in their deaths. Eventually, Lemon says he’s sad, and suddenly there’s an epilogue where he has become a better person. He has stopped drinking and smoking, and somehow that should make the readers feel satisfied, but the book misses that mark by a wide margin.
Lemon, in his bid to show and not tell, ends up not telling the reader anything. Is he scared? Is he angry? Readers don’t know. There are a lot of conversations that go nowhere and show the same thing over and over again—that these college kids like to drink and curse and act macho. Most of the conversations consist of “What a fuckin’ night,” “don’t fuck up,” and “you’re getting all fucking Finnegans Wake on us.” Supposedly, this will make everything seem more real, immediate, and harsh. But what it does is stereotype Lemon’s friends into one über-jackass, a hulking behemoth with a backwards cap and an inability to utter a sentence without saying “fuck.” Lemon also likes to use nouns as verbs, and this often doesn’t work. Hair “staircases,” people “siphon” out of clothes, squirrels “monster” (those must be some sinister squirrels). He does get in a few good ones: In a moment of pain, his blood riots.
The biggest problem with Happy is that nothing really drives the book forward. Lemon’s portrayal of himself and his friends is so banally unsympathetic that the only thing that makes readers continue turning pages is the disbelief that Lemon isn’t coming to any sort of realizations about himself and his behavior. He seems to feel real emotion towards the very end, but by that time, readers will be pretty sick of him.
Readers will want to feel empathy for Alex. He’s been through some crappy things, but he presents himself as a remorseless jerk. This wouldn’t be so bad if Happy contained a transformation, an epiphany, a something other than a bunch of profanity-filled conversations and a sudden rush towards the clichéd ending. There’s no dramatic arc and the vignettes have little relation to the larger story. With some shaping and a sharp editorial eye, Happy could have been a much more satisfying memoir.
(February, 2010)
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