'HAPPY DAYS' | A review French novel blends comedic moments with contemplation

The narrator is on a quest for fewer 'distractions from reality.'
By MICHAEL UPCHURCH
SEATTLE TIMES
"Happy Days," by Laurent Graff, translated by Linda Coverdale (Carroll and Graf, $11)
Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener -- the Manhattan office clerk who, when it came to any task, would always "prefer not to" -- now has French company.
The narrator of "Happy Days," an absurd yet strangely compelling novella (the first book by Parisian author Laurent Graff to appear in English), is an apparently sane and healthy man who decides to pack it in and spend the rest of his life in a retirement home -- at age 35.
Granted, Antoine has been an odd fish from early on. At 18, an age when, as he concedes, most young people are buying their first cars, he bought his grave site and tombstone.
"I felt," he explains, "that I'd experienced everything that constitutes, roughly speaking, the average full life, ranging from love to work, lofty ideals to crass ambition, disappointment to boredom ... I decided to live resigned to my lot, without any fuss or expectations, and to prepare myself for what was coming."
Having his own burial arrangements all lined up before he's out of his teens doesn't stop him from getting married and having children. But when the marriage ends, he moves into Happy Days, a local retirement community, rather than the usual divorced dad's bachelor pad.
He is, as he puts it, in search of "the bare minimum of distractions from reality." And in Happy Days, he thinks he's found it.
Not what he thought
That isn't quite the case, as Graff slyly shows. For one thing, Antoine's companions -- his good friend Alzheimer ("Al" for short), sex-hungry Clarisse, fitness-fanatic Bebel and numerous others -- aren't as peacefully reconciled to their mortality as Antoine assumes them to be.
For another, Happy Days is prey, like any other institution, to its fair share of thoroughly "distracting" mishaps (an accidental outing to an Iggy Pop concert -- "due to a mix-up of dates" -- chief among them). And finally, Antoine's own motives, especially his voyeuristic tendencies when it comes to death, are a bit dubious.
But rather than simply tasteless, the tone here is an unexpected mix of the comedic and the contemplative. The book's epigraphs, including one from Japanese Zen-Buddhist garden designer Muso Soseki ("I threw away that tiny thing called 'me' and I became the great wide world"), signal Graff's serious intent from the start.
Beauty in translation
Certainly his prose can be as beautiful as it is farcical in tone. "I've always loved benches," Antoine tells us, in one striking passage. "They're the image of a withdrawal, the seat of a contemplative distance, a peaceful marginality at the edge of the world. They represent a privileged observation post, a disengagement off the beaten path for those who know how to pause there."
Linda Coverdale's fluent translation tactfully renders the book's tricky mixture of the profound and the profane. The coincidence of title with Samuel Beckett's famous play is unfortunate, perhaps, but unavoidable. (In French, Beckett's title is "Oh les beaux jours," while Graff's is "Les jours heureux.")
Here's an improbably funny, improbably wise little book that leaves you hoping Coverdale will bring more of Graff's work into English as soon as possible.