HAPPINESS FALLS, by Angie Kim
On a summer morning in 2020, Adam Parson vanishes while hiking in a suburban Virginia park with his 14-year-old son, Eugene. Eugene returns home agitated and alone, dried blood caked under his fingernails, but he can’t tell his family what happened: He has a dual diagnosis of autism and Angelman syndrome, a developmental disorder, and doesn’t speak.
What happened to Adam? Answering that question is the ostensible raison d’être of “Happiness Falls,” Angie Kim’s discursive second novel. (Her first, “Miracle Creek,” also put an autistic character at the center of the plot.) But the mystery turns out to be little more than a vehicle for exploring a dense thicket of ideas that seem to interest Kim more than the fate of a missing middle-aged father: the relativity of happiness; the way we make sense of events based on scant evidence; the Korean concept of jeong (“that sense of belonging to the same whole, your fates intertwined, impossible to sever no matter how much you may want to”); Noam Chomsky’s theory of psycholinguistic nativism; the rudiments of speech therapy; and, above all, the pervasive mislabeling and misunderstanding of neurodivergent people.
Narrating this tornado of a book is Parson’s 20-year-old daughter, Mia, a caustic polymath who has moved home during the Covid pandemic. Mia may be neurotypical, but she’s hardly typical. The title of her college honors thesis: “Philosophy of Music and Algorithmic Programming: Locke, Bach, and K-pop vs. Prokofiev, Sartre, and Jazz Rap.” She casually tosses off allusions to “The Twilight Zone” and the philosopher William of Ockham and likes to dwell on “micro-anomalies,” parsing the minutiae of everyday interactions for meaning. The story of Adam’s disappearance, as recounted and dissected by Mia, is as colorful and mutable as a lava lamp.
An acquaintance lets slip that Adam had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Did he die by suicide to spare his family? A voice mail on Adam’s phone from a woman makes the police and family wonder if he was having an affair. Has he run away with a paramour? (Momentarily, and to her shame, Mia thinks she’d rather Adam were dead than adulterous.)
A cellphone video raises a particularly dreadful possibility: Did Eugene have something to do with Adam’s vanishing? Enigmatic texts must be parsed, passwords cracked, the contents of Adam’s puzzling journal digested and — if possible — Eugene’s bricked-up storehouse of memories accessed. As each clue surfaces, Mia devises a new theory of what happened to her father, reinterpreting everything that has come before and interrogating how she feels about it, appending dozens of rambling footnotes.
It’s an engaging read, but whip-smart Mia is an overbearing and prolix narrator. So relentlessly does she analyze every tidbit of material that the book can feel a little airless.
“I’m a sucker for twist endings,” Mia tells us. “I love to turn back immediately to the beginning and rewatch/reread, marvel at the impact of one assumption being upended, how the scenes are the same but their meanings changed, things you didn’t notice before popping out.”
This passage suggests, none too subtly, that we might do the same with the book in our hands. Indeed, “Happiness Falls” features a third-act twist so elaborate that you may feel you are finishing a different work of fiction than the one you picked up. I did turn back to the beginning of “Happiness Falls” after reading the last page, but out of professional obligation, not a burning desire to revisit details I might have misinterpreted. With obsessive Mia as narrator, I hadn’t had an opportunity to interpret — let alone misinterpret — anything at all.
Jennifer Reese, the author of “Make the Bread, Buy the Butter,” is a freelance writer and critic.
HAPPINESS FALLS | By Angie Kim | 400 pp. | Hogarth | $28