One of the great pleasures of life is sitting down with a book and finding that the blurb on the back cover, though wonderfully poetic, beautifully written and fulsomely enticing, does not do full justice to the novel before you.
Clearly it’s done a brilliant job of luring you in so mission accomplished there; but as you dive into your latest read, it is so good to realise that there is happily so much more to the story at hand, something which emerges quite strongly and quickly in the multitudinous delights of Jacquie Byron’s debut novel, Happy Hour.
There is so much to like about this empathetic, insightful, warm, honest and funny book.
For a start the lead character of Frances Calderwood, who is so vibrantly and richly realised that you will wish you knew her in real life (or maybe you do, in which case, you are blessed indeed), is reason enough to read Happy Hour.
A 65-year-old artist living in Melbourne’s Cheltenham, Frances is a wild child Bohemian type who has more than a sense of the Auntie Mame, observing cocktail hour every night at 6pm which she takes in the company of her dogs Whisky and Soda and photos of her dead husband Frank whom she lost in an accident three agonising years ago.
She is larger than life, and more than able to deliver a pithy line or witty retort in no time flat, the sort of person who knows the local cafe owner like she’s family, who can wear everything from kaftans to pant suits and look fabulous, and who has travelled the world and Carpe Diem’d the hell out of everything she is fortunate enough to have had fall across her avuncular path.
“Franny refused to consider the habit [ talking to photos of Frank] odd. It wasn’t as if she expecting an otherworldly response; even the idea of that made her arm hairs stand on end. No, it was that she’d been speaking to Frank for over forty years. Why stop now? And, as she’d tell anyone who asked, not that there really was anyone to ask, ‘It’s not like he always responded when he was alive.'” (P. 3)
But as we meet Frances, many of these qualities have been muted or lost entirely, with the onetime celebrated children’s author and exhibited painter lost in the miasmic confines of grief.
She and Frank were soul mates and best friends, and his loss, coming suddenly and on a night when they felt on top of the world after a delightful weekend away with friends, crushes her.
As Happy Hour begins its heartfelt and funny exploration of life in a time of great pain and loss, Frances has turned her back on friends, her found family and life as she once knew it, living a shadow of her former existence which has all the decadent trappings of the time before but without any of the joy that was once an extravagant hallmark of a life well lived (there is also a lot of talking to the photos of frank which sit in every room, an odd habit to some which Frances sees as entirely normal).
In every way possible, Happy Hour captures grief in all its complex contrariness, acknowledging its consuming finality, its seeming endlessness, and the reality that what is true for one person is manifestly untrue for another.
Looking at the persistently caring attempts by Frances’ best friend Anthea and goddaughter Elouise, and her sister-in-law Marg to keep her in their lives, you might wonder why on earth the grief-stricken hermit doesn’t realise how impoverished her life has become, its glamorous trappings notwithstanding.
The truth of the matter is though, and anyone who has felt the dread hand of all-consuming grief on them will attest to this, is that when you are deep inside the expansive of total and unending loss that it is well nigh impossible to find your way out.
While it is very much true that you do not want to deal with the loss of someone entirely on your own – I love the back cover quote by Mary Moody who rightly observes that Happy Hour is “… a hilarious and poignant reminder that grief is a journey that should NEVER be travelled alone” – and having your village around you makes the hideousness of grief feel not so soul-evisceratingly terrible, it is also hard to see any point with engaging with anyone.
After all, with that special someone gone, how can anyone ever come close to filling the void?
Frances is certain that she never will, and while that is true as far as the uniqueness of Frank and her supremely happy marriage to him, it is challenged when the Salerno family move in next door – overwhelmed mum Sallyanne, grappling with a messy separation, malcontented teenager Dee and gloriously quirky eight-year-old Josh – and proceed to upend her unwanted hermitic lifestyle.
The moving genius of Byron’s writing is that it doesn’t rush the intertwining of Frances and her next door neighbours, allowing them to come together in a wholly believable, organic way, accepting of the fact that these kinds of relationships are linear or instant, and that they come with as many backward steps and misunderstandings as they do unexpected blissful steps into a more connected future.
“Josh exploded into stories about cops and robbers and being scared. Sallyanne gathered both children in her arms. Putting her mouth against Dee’s ear she whispered, ‘You okay, sweet girl?’
Dee looked back towards Franny, who has returned to her position in front of the noiseless television. The young girl’s eyes brimmed with tears. ‘We’re okay, mum.’ She nodded her head a few times, ‘Franny was here.'” (P. 192)
Happy Hour is content at every stage to simply let life follow its own inevitably wonderful but flawed and broken at times path.
And we are all the richer for it as we witness Frances slowly but far from easily begin to slowly make her way out of her three-year long shutting out of the world and the Salernos, in need of a fair amount of healing themselves, draw her into their world which is much in need of someone like Frances, even if she doesn’t realise it yet.
In a year where Australia’s two largest states by population and its capital territory have been locked more often than not in lockdown, causing all kinds of relationship ruptures, Happy Hour is like a balm for the sad and lonely soul, a timely reminder of the immense power and value of connectedness.
But it also sagely knows that while being connected with others is indisputably good, that sometimes we are so lost in the dark times of life that we fail to see this, the forest out of sight because of the grief-laden trees.
Byron gets both the barrenness and necessity of grief but also the joy of having people love and support you unconditionally, and how the two might feel diametrically opposed but in the end, fit together beautifully in ways that Frances, who is absolutely someone you will wish again and again was your next door neighbour, comes to appreciate in a novel that will steal your heart, speak to your mind and enrich your tired and weary, and perhaps even sad soul, in ways you didn’t even know you needed.