Happiness TM [Paperback]

"The Age of Nice is at hand, and there's nothing we can do about it." But the main protagonist of Will Ferguson's Happinesss terminally luckless book editor Edwin de Valu does want to do something. In fact, he feels obliged to put a stop to the Age of Nice, because it's all his fault. Desperate to save a flagging career in the world of self-help publishing, Edwin has staked everything on a dubious, thousand-page manuscript bearing the motto "Live! Love! Learn!" Promising its readers endless wealth, effortless weight loss and everlasting happiness, the book has become a runaway success. And that's where Edwin's problems really begin. Not just the murderous cartel of drug and tobacco barons who want Edwin's head on a plate. Also the fact that misery, cynicism, irrational hatred, draught beer--all the things that once made Edwin's life as an underdog bearable--have become outlawed. It's down to one man to save the globe from the tyranny of the Group Hug. But can Edwin do it, before the world economy melts down and a bestselling serial killer called Dr Ethics enacts his own deadly revenge?

It has been said--possibly by the sort of homily-peddling guru that Ferguson attacks so masterfully in his debut novel--that there are many routes to happiness. The general effect of reading this razor-sharp satire on the self-help industry is to understand that these routes lead us nowhere, except perhaps to a cul-de-sac called Hell. This would be depressing to realise, except that Happiness clubs its readers into submission with the sort of zany, almost other-worldly wit that makes us profoundly glad to be alive. --Matthew Baylis --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

What might happen if one of those self-help books actually worked? All America appears to be joining the HappinessT cult - but the book's low-level editor at Pandaric Press now has a contract out on him by a cartel of drug, alcohol, tobacco and drug-rehab bosses! A hugely acclaimed comic masterpiece.

A gleeful satire of the self-help industry. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Hilarious. Ferguson takes no prisoners: Happiness TM is a caustic and outrageously funny send-up of society's foibles. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Will Ferguson is a very gifted writer. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Happiness is a wonderfully assured, gleefully twisted and deeply irreligious satire which manages to be as moving as it is funny. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

While the rest of the country is joining the new happinessTM cult, Edwin (the wiry, grey-suited, low-level editor at New York publisher Panderic Press) is in trouble. A cartel of drug, alcohol, tobacco and drug-rehab bosses have a contract out on him. It's all the fault of the mysterious Tupac Soiree, and his book What I Learned on the Mountain. But who is Tupac? And how can Edwin stop the world from succumbing to this plague of HappinessTM?

Prescribed reading for the twenty-first Century. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

WILL FERGUSON is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed travel memoir Hokkaido Highway Blues (Canongate). His first three books were plucked from the slush pile. Will lives in Calgary, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies.

CHAPTER 1

Grand Avenue cuts through the very heart of the city, from 71st Street all the way to the harbourfront, and although it is eight lanes wide, with a treed boulevard running down the middle, the Avenue feels claustrophobic and narrow.

Rising up in straight verticals, and flanking either side, are Grand Avenue's imposing Edwardian buildings, their facades creating two continuous walls. Many of these edifices were built during the Great Potash Boom of the late 1920s, with all that that entails: sombre Calvinistic capitalist features and a grim, heavy-handed feel. Buildings without laughter. From up on high, where the angels sit, Grand Avenue looks very handsome indeed, a veritable showcase of architectural dignity. But down below, on the level of the street, it is a far different scenario, one of littered, gritty, noisy lanes choked with exhaust and angry taxis, of mad rambling panhandlers and scurrying office workers. A world of constant din, where the echoing noise of traffic ricochets off the buildings in a constant, cacophonous roar. The noise is an eternal presence here. With nowhere to go and no way to escape, it is caught in a perpetual standing wave, a never-ending feedback of cityscape clatter. Static of the Gods.

But if the dominant sense from on high is visual, and on the street level aural, down below, in the depths of the Loop, it is the sense of smell that is most saturated and most abused. Here, in a miasma of fumes, trains rattle-bang on an endless Mšbius strip of work, sweat, salt and grubby lucre. A merry-go-round where the horses have emphysema, the paint is peeling and the smell of halitosis and body odour swirls in oily whirls through the air, in the air-is the air. Bodies inhaling dioxide, recycling waste, pressed into wedges already sticky in this: the morning rush-hour crush. In the city, the bottom layer, the lowest level, is one of smell.

Edwin Vincent de Valu (a.k.a. Ed, a.k.a. Eddie, a.k.a. Edwynne in his poetry-reading college dorm days) emerges from the underground at Faust and Broadview like a gopher into a towering canyon. On Grand Avenue, the rain is dirty before it hits the ground. Edwin had once caught a solo drop on the back of his hand, had stopped and marvelled at that single bead of water, already streaked with soot.

Edwin is a thin, officious young man with a tall, scarecrow walk and dry straw hair that refuses to hold a part. Even when dressed in a designer overcoat and polished turtle-cut Dicanni shoes, Edwin de Valu has a singular lack of presence. A lack of substance. He is a lightweight, in every sense of the word, and the morning's commute almost sweeps him under. In the urban Darwinism of rush hour, Edwin has to fight just to keep afloat, has to strain just to keep his head above the deluge. No one-least of all Edwin himself-could ever have suspected that the entire fate of the Western World would soon rest upon his narrow shoulders.

On Grand Avenue, the eastside underscore of sour milk and stale urine, so ever-present you start to taste it on your tongue, greeted Edwin like a familiar slap to the face. Like a worn-out motif. A metaphor for something else. Something worse.

As Edwin crossed Grand Avenue, en masse with a crush of rumpled jackets, damp shirts, and groaning attachŽ cases, and as the traffic echoed into white noise around him and the queasy smells of the city trailed in his wake . . . he looked up, up to where the morning sun was catching the high edge of the buildings, a mocking gold glow out of reach and almost out of sight. And he thought to himself, as he did every day at precisely this spot and precisely this moment: I hate this fuckin' city.

For all its architectural facades and historic pretensions, Grand Avenue is little more than a crowded assemblage of filing cabinets, lined up, squeezed in, one after the other, relentless and almost endless. Inside these filing cabinets you will find ad agencies, business consultants, secret sweatshops and modern software developers, pyramid schemes and investment firms, small dreams and big dreams, executives and peons, plastic cafeterias and anonymous love affairs, accountants, attorneys, contortionists and chiropractors, moneymen and mountebanks, systems analysts, cosmetics salesmen and stock-market financiers: gymnasiums of the absurd and self-cancelling circuses of unrequited desire.

You will find all this and more filed away on Grand Avenue. But most importantly, you will find publishers, an entire dizzying procession of publishers: some little more than a name on a door, some cogs in vast multimedia empires; some responsible for launching great literary careers, others responsible for Sidney Sheldon-and every one of them clinging to the cachet of a Grand Avenue address.

Publishers infiltrate Grand Avenue like larval termites. Hidden in the maze of cubicles and corridors that lie in wait behind the sombre Edwardian facades, you will find dozens upon dozens of these publishers, swilling their swamp of words, churning the muck, breeding in captivity. Here, manuscripts are stacked high, and great mounds of festering papers accumulate. Here, women without makeup and men without fashion sense sit huddled, sharpened blue pencils in hand, scratching, scratching, endlessly scratching at the voluminous outpourings of that most egotistical of creatures: the writer.

This is the belly of the beast, the ulcerous stomach of the nation's book publishing-world, and Edwin de Valu, crossing Grand Avenue en route to his cubicle at Panderic Books Incorporated, is smack dab in the swampy middle of the quagmire. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.