Stella Duffy: State of Happiness

Reviewed by ELEANOR BLACK for canvas

It's the best sort of bare-faced cheek. British/Kiwi novelist Stella Duffy's first departure from the chick lit/lesbian crime thriller oeuvre — which earned her a cult following but few literary accolades — bounced her straight onto the Orange Prize shortlist.

State Of Happiness is a crisp, smallish novel with a deceptively simple storyline and a painful lash in the tail. What appears to be a bittersweet love story about a glamorous New York-based British television producer (Jack) and his bracingly intellectual map-maker girlfriend (Cindy) is really a treatise on the meaning of life and death. Gloom is the novel's most powerful feature. Even when all is well — professional life on track, love-life singing, sun shining — there is a heavy sense of dread: these people are in for a heap of pain.

When Jack is offered his dream job in California, Cindy reluctantly goes with him. They move into a house by the ocean which defies expectation (and logic) by turning away from the sea, looking instead towards the mountains — which seems to be a metaphor for the unconventional Cindy herself. The only room with a view of the sea is the shower room, where Cindy, angry at being cheated of an identifiably Californian experience, spends a lot of time gazing out the window.

She also likes to walk in the bush near the house and initially it is this unaccustomed exercise which gets the blame for her sudden weight loss and fatigue. Tests confirm the worst (although we never learn what the disease is, it behaves like cancer) and it is here that Duffy's story finds its grunt. Before this, the mere sketches of setting and almost token attempts at fleshing out secondary characters create a sense of unreality which is interesting but leaves you feeling empty.

The novel's tone is cool as a California Zinfandel and it slips down in a similarly moreish fashion. It's spare and honest, not given to overblown emotion even when tackling the most horrific situations.

The clinical approach perfectly suits the characterisation of Cindy, a reserved, scientific thinker whose approach to her illness is to quickly accept it, submit herself to a series of painful tests and procedures, and try to keep working, keep living. Jack, who comes across as a less intelligent, more passionate person, doesn't fare as well under Duffy's pen. You don't get a strong sense of who he is — it's all happening to Cindy and sometimes he appears to be simply a reflective surface for her grief.

You'd think Duffy's experience of cancer — she survived breast cancer in 2000 — would have taught her that it is sometimes worse for those who love a critically ill person than it is for the victim.

* Virago, $27