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I'm a voracious reader of poetry - somewhere between 50 and 150 chapbooks and full-length collections a year - and opportunity cost being what it is, that volume's got to come at the expense of something. I used to read a lot more non-fiction; that's dwindled considerably. In my twenties I read more novels and mysteries, and right now might read one or two per year. You can get hung up on what you're missing, or enjoy what you're reading, and I've always believed in the latter. There's more written than you can ever read. You're going to miss most of it. Grab a book and relax.
Last month I read Gabrielle Zevin's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", a novel about friends making games with each other and fighting bitterly and that doesn't do it justice, because it's an excellent book, one of my favourites I've read this year. And I often come across new books by chaining - a side-mention in an article about a particular book, for example, which might lead me to several more. This is how I came across "Happy Hour", Marlowe Granados' highly lauded debut, published in 2020 by Flying Books. It is, in every measure, squarely not aimed at me: chronicling one summer by friends Isa Epley and Gala Novak in New York City in 2013. Light on traditional plot and arcs, it has what BookTok calls "no plot, just vibes."
If you're not familiar with BookTok, it's the part of TikTok centered on book reviews and recommendations. It skews young, and female, and it's easy to see how this book would play well there. Isa and Gala are presented in a flashburst of episodic days, each rarely having any connection to the other. They are in the United States on visas, and can't legally work. They pull in cash under the table to try to make rent. They work a clothing stall in Chinatown. They're paid audience members on live TV. They consider the possibility of foot modelling. And they're always behind on what they owe, always trying to figure out new ways to make some cash (or, Isa is, at least). But they always find a way. They're glamorous, and beautiful, and have each other's back. The novel is about existing, and mooching, and being fabulous, from May through through September a decade ago.
Very different from what I normally like to read. I've long since accepted that what I read and love is niche. Most poetry books I've rated on Goodreads have somewhere between a handful and a hundred ratings. 10 to 30 is common. How big is BookTok's bicep? "Happy Hour" has over 17000 ratings.
Who Needs Plot When You Have Vibes? (Elle)
Outside of the boozy, meandering plot, Happy Hour is about other things as well, borders being something that jumps to mind immediately: both from the precarity of the situation Isa and Gala find themselves in, as well as the impossibility of upward mobility. And never mind mobility, even equality and decency are shockingly out of reach. At a number of times throughout the book, Isa, dark in hair and complexion to Gala's fair blonde looks, is referred to as "exotic" by lunk-headed men. For so many of them, Isa is an object, not a person. Gala is the traditional white ideal of beauty, pale and blonde. Isa is her complement: dark skin, dark hair; possessor of a foreign name; an Other. And Isa is an Other not just in nationality, or in social standing, but in her way of speaking. Throughout, Granados writes her with a very particular style.
The Party Girl's Revenge: Granados' debut novel is a picaresque for the glamorous and broke
Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz, for Vulture, calls it "distinctive, Old Hollywood" and "practically ... a transatlantic accent." I flipped to a random page (152) for an example:
Men are so funny, so noble. But only when it's easiest to be. It is interesting to note that many people believe getting someone to treat you with respect is an achievement. I know I'm in New York, but I simply cannot aspire to having the bar set so low.
Isa's narration is a combination of both using and forsaking contractions, doling out no small amount of advice ("one ought...", "one must..."), the kind that comes easy when you're in your early twenties and believe that everything you're thinking is breathtakingly original and interesting. The problem is that I can't tell if Isa is well-written or not. Her manner of narration throws me off, its style aspiring to a certain time (the 20s and 30s?), or maybe even timelessness. But now, another confession: someone from my past, someone who hurt me very badly, used to write exactly the way Granados writes Isa. The moment I realized this, I couldn't unsee it. I spent most of the novel narrating Isa in her voice. It was deeply uncomfortable. It made my skin crawl.
The book's been called all vibes, and while the plot is loose, or seemingly absent, there definitely is a plot: things do happen to Isa and Gala and their friends, it's just that they don't feel particularly impactful, or long-lasting. At the end of the night, there's always someone to pick up the tab. When homelessness threatens, there's a friend's bed, a vacant apartment. These kinds of situations are easy to write because they're low stakes. There's no danger. They dissolve like sugar on the tongue. Isa starts the novel at a kimono party (because, I guess, why not?), getting into a limousine with a tabloid-fodder actor. It starts the book with a bang, but then, it never goes anywhere consequential. The actor disappears to his life. If Gala and Isa struggle for money, and they do, it never feels like anything bad will happen. They'll sell some clothes in Chinatown, find other ways to hustle. There'll always be an invitation for a party later. They can't afford it, but they can. They're young and beautiful. Someone's card will be good.
Taken as a whole, the book is a collection of these little episodes, the "vibes" Elle describes. Things happen to Isa and Gala. They party, sell clothes at the market, find money for French 75s. Eventually, the summer's over. The end! Don't you want this to be you?! Focus on Isa and Gala, but don't linger too long on anyone else. Throughout, the minor characters are uninteresting, one-dimensional and underdeveloped. The biggest antagonist, a boorish Brit named Coop that Isa knows from her days in London, is barely worth describing. He aspires to the same things Isa and Gala do, but has the benefit of slightly more means. That doesn't stop him from having his card declined at a large dinner, to the sniggers of other diners. He, too, is scratching desperately at a particular kind of life. He's ostensibly got more means, but he's courting disaster, too. Everyone in this book is hustling all the time.
Marlowe Granados wants to center the muse
In an interview with Josh Greenblatt in Document, Granados is asked why she wrote the book, and then, who for. She replies,
Josh: I was going to ask, who was your intended audience?
Marlowe: To be honest, I wanted to write something that my friends could read, that showed who they were in an accurate way. My friends are these very feminine, very beautiful young women. We have such thoughtful conversations, and provide so much support within our friendships about going through heartbreak, or dynamics with friends, that I felt wasn’t really being accurately depicted anywhere.
So then, why? Why would I buy a novel for which I'm so far out of the intended audience? I'm not young, I'm not beautiful, and if you pressed me, I'd admit that I never really was either of those things. When Isa Epley is twenty-one, she's broke and beautiful and finding a way month to month in one of the most glamorous cities in the world. When I was twenty-one, I was finishing my bachelor's degree in an unremarkable Canadian city, getting ready for my master's like a chain smoker starting a new cigarette off the dying embers of the first.
My life, for years before and after, was studying and academics, prep work for the decades ahead. I was going to teach, and research (I didn't). Isa and I couldn't be more unalike. But when I was twenty, just weeks after the only one-night stand of my life, I had another kind of invitation from a different young woman:
xxx: "you should come to mtl! i'd love to have you over for yur feb break!"
Then, as now, I didn't write down everything, but I wrote down some. Years of chats with countless people are long lost, but I saved that one line in a friends-only entry on my LiveJournal because the offer stunned me, and if you think you know me, if you think I didn't take her up on it, you're absolutely right.
I've had very few relationships. The person from my past you might think I'd hold closest, the person who was my first, is barely remembered. Faded. Our memories now sepia-toned. And in fact the only quasi-regret I've ever really allowed myself to hold isn't with this person at all, but instead with the young woman I met a few years before, the one who invited me to come east. Who was never anything official, though I fell hard for her, and she, I found out later, fell hard for me too. What if & what if.
So it goes. Life rarely works the way we'd ask it. So my answer, why Granados' "Happy Hour", why a book so ostensibly unsuited for me? Because when I was twenty, I could've spent a week in a city I'd only glimpsed briefly in the past, with a young woman who, well, same. Maybe we'd only be friends. Maybe we could have been more. I don't know what we would have been, or if we would have worked. But I would have had a very different sort of life. "Happy Hour" speaks loudly to that allure, that potential. When things were far more open, far more precarious. When everything seemed to balance on the blade of a knife.
But the point is, even if I'll never know, I'll still come back to it. Wonder if my life would have been demonstrably different than what I have now. Would I still have fallen for my current partner? Would I be living somewhere off Rue Sainte-Catherine, making a new life at the mouth of the St. Lawrence? There are no answers to this in my life. But maybe ideas, glimpses, in a book.
The premise of "Happy Hour" intrigued me, even though I ultimately found the book unsatisfying and flat. Maybe I'm being unfair; maybe I'm among the writers Isa describes in one of the book's many episodes, who publish biannual little journals with circulations of dozens, convinced they're changing the world. So even if it wasn't aimed at me, even if it wasn't what I wanted it to be, it was still fine. Isa and Gala and their friends are stand-ins for the sorts of people Granados knows, and loves. I was not them. I will never be them. But I can look in, and wonder, then look for my next book. As for this one, well, it doesn't have to be for me. It has an audience. Nearly twenty thousand ratings on Goodreads. It's clearly found its place.