And Yet They Were Happy

by Helen Phillips

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD longlist nominee, Helen Phillips's debut novel, And Yet They Were Happy is "A gallery of marvels." A young couple comes of age in a surreal world of apocalypse, delight, longing, and tenderness.  "Brilliant miniatures. . . . Like the fables of Calvino, Millhauser, or W.S. Merwin. . . . Beautifully blends short story and prose poem. . . . Mermaids, subways, floods, cucumbers, magicians. . . .The book is a gallery of marvels. Phillips guides us through the 'Hall of Nostalgia For Things We Have Never Seen,' 'the factory where the virgins are made,' and 'the Anne Frank School for Expectant Mothers.' A depressed Noah admits he 'didn't get them all,' a wife guesses which of two identical men is her husband, a regime orders citizens to grow raspberries on windowsills. [Helen Phillips'] quietly elegant sentences are as clear as spring water, haunting as our own childhood memories."—Michael Dirda "A deeply interesting mind is at work in these wry, lyrical stories. Phillips exploits the duality of our nature to create a timeless and most engaging collection."—Amy Hempel "Haunted and lyrical and edible all at once."—Rivka Galchen A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world haunted by monsters, plagued by disasters, full of longing—but also one of transformation, wonder, and delight, peopled by the likes of Noah, Bob Dylan, the Virgin Mary, and Anne Frank. Hovering between reality and fantasy, whimsy and darkness, these linked fables describe a universe both surreal and familiar. Helen Phillips received a 2009 Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, 2009 Meridian Editors' Prize, and 2008 Italo Calvino Fabulist Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and two anthologies. She holds degrees from Yale University and Brooklyn College, and teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Novels, Poetry, American

310 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 2011

About the author

Helen Phillips is the author of five books, including, most recently, the novel THE NEED. Her collection SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection AND YET THEY WERE HAPPY was named a Notable Book by the Story Prize. She is also the author of the children's adventure novel HERE WHERE THE SUNBEAMS ARE GREEN. Helen is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. www.helencphillips.com.

Reviews

[Jeannine · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the recommendation of no less of a highbrow literary publication than Elle Magazine (and hey, I discovered Louise Gluck through Cosmo, so…) I picked up a copy of Helen Phillips’ And Yet They Were Happy. Once again, I turned the page expecting long chapters and a traditional narrative, but found, instead, over a hundred connected short form pieces – about two pages apiece – with narrators that shifted, apocalyptic overtones, characters from Greek mythology and the Bible, and monsters. Of course, I fell in love with the book. (Snow White even makes an appearance!) From “Regime #6:” Because our government is concerned about the low number of infants being produced by our population on an annual basis, a National Reproduction Day is declared, and the lights on the subway are turned to their lowest, rosiest settings. Slender white candles are given out free of charge. All married citizens of childbearing age are ordered to stay home.” A fascinating portrait of an intelligent and interesting inner life.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read 6/7/11 - 6/23/11
3 Stars - Recommended to readers familiar with genre
Pgs: 305

And Yet They Were Happy joined the list of author/reader discussion novels this month on TNBBC and was welcomed with words of praise and excitement.

This collection of short stories stands out among the rest of it's kind because each of the stories contained between it's covers are exactly two pages long: Two-paged stories that detail the lives of a young recently married couple who manage to make their home among the chaos of disasters, floods, and monsters.

The intentional symmetry of the stories forced author Helen Philips to choose her words carefully. (Word economy, I have to believe, is not something a writer usually concerns themselves with.) Pulling from personal experience, existing fables and legends, and even her own dreams, Phillips creatively constructs a world unlike any I have ever known.

Some of her stories have a hazy, murky, magically dreamlike quality to them. I likened them to "a fever dream" - dreams that are at once terrifying and surreal and make sense as you're dreaming them, but quickly evaporate into inexplicable, confusing, disjointed stories as you attempt to describe them upon waking. These stories always left me frustrated. The more I tried to make sense of them, the more I felt the meaning slip away.

Others softly simmered over religious undertones. Stories like "Flood #2" which finds Noah old and defeated at a bar as he explains to the bartender that "the rain just kept coming..It became difficult to gather them two by two". And "Flood #3" where Noah would awaken from nightmares of a great flood which prompted him to construct an Ark he never had to use. These stories were my favorite. I really enjoyed her visions of Adam and Eve, Noah and his Ark, and the peacefulness that lived within those tales.

The stories are broken up into chapters that serve as a sort of explanation or description of the stories you will find there. The chapter titled "We" contains a cute story of the young couple as they make intricate plans on where to meet up should they become separated out in the world. In the "Wife" chapters, we learn of a couple who must store their pet birds in their freezer as they begin to die off. "Regime" contains a story where the town decreed that hanging out laundry to dry is no longer allowed. Yet an old woman who lives near our married couple continues to hang hers out, and while the sirens ring down the street, everyone admires her clothesline, looking for clues.

The overall construction of the collection is impressive. Phillips mentioned in our discussion that the NYC publishers declined picking up the collection due to it's inability to be categorized - it fails to fit neatly into a genre. Though that was not an issue for Leapfrog Press, an indie publisher who continues to release top quality fiction. They have quite an eye for storytelling and the chances they take always seem to pay off!

This book will not work for everyone. Fans of Blake Butler will appreciate Helen Phillips's creative spin on storytelling. These are stories that, though they are incredibly short, force the reader to think about what it is they are reading. This book does not promise a happy ending - or any sort of ending, really. It can be read cover to cover, story to story or you can skip around and "dip" into different sections. In fact, Helen mentioned in the discussion that one of her readers tackled the collection by reading all the short stories that were numbered #1 first, then #2 second....

If you are ready to experience short stories in a format unlike any other, I encourage you to seek out And Yet They Were Happy.

Enjoy the book trailer while you think about it by visiting my blog - http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...

[Alayne Bushey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some stories simply win you over with sheer perseverance.

Opening the cover of And Yet They Were Happy by Helen Phillips I was certainly not prepared for the fable-like entries on each page. More than a collection of short-stories, Phillips' work consists of brief snippets into her mind, tiny replications of places, moments, moods. Fears. Each scene part of a theme, the floods, the envies, the regimes, taking place in the limited span of a spread of open-faced pages.

Yes, I'd read the collection would somehow involve the likes of Noah and Bob Dylan, amongst others, and I was intrigued. But chalking it up to short themed-fables does not encompass the fictional way our characters find themselves in horrifying plights and comic-relief-scenarios. These stories tug at your heartstrings, and before you know it, you're eagerly devouring each spread to see what fantastic tale comes next. Will it be strangely magical, or hauntingly melancholic?

Something about Phillips' stories hooked me when I was least expecting it. I thought it came at the end, but looking back, I think it was we? #5 that did it. The brief entry of a woman "whose sadness was so enormous she knew it would kill her if she didn't squeeze it into a cube one centimeter by centimeter by one centimeter." Or perhaps it was we? #6, the story of a couple who devises detailed plans for what to do if they're ever separated from each other, whether by train or death.

Maybe it was just Helen that won me over, something autobiographical in her writing that opens her head to the voyeurs beyond the page. How she ends the themes with a section entitled the helens. How I can feel passion and pain from her words. Who are we to turn away when someone has opened their mind up like she has?

No matter the reason, And Yet They Were Happy is unique in ways you just don't find these days. Support Helen's book (coming May 1, 2011 from Leapfrog Press), and all books published by independent presses. Pre-order And Yet They Were Happy and help save the dying art that is unconventional fiction.

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I bought a nook recently. I didn't read this on the nook cause it won't be available on the nook until the 17th but also because I didn't see any reason to read it on the nook. I bought it the day it came in, then phillips came in and signed, so I switched mine out for a signed copy. It's a lovely book, heavy with that matte fuzzy feeling and YELLOW.

Okay to the point, I think the author wrote the back cover, I say this because I'm not sure that anyone else would have any idea this is a novel about a young couple.

I think this is actually more like amelia gray's book a lot of baby stories that might live in a unified web or they might exist as flickers somehow contextually interdependent. But beautiful, if you really look for the young couple you may find them, but what's more important is the world, but not the forest the trees.

[Kaycee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! It made me think, laugh out loud on the subway, and steal away moments to read throughout the day. I savored each little story bit by bit, not wanting the all the goodness to end. Can't wait to start reading it all over again. If you are a girlfriend of mine please buy this book and support an awesome new author!

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much like a Magic Eye painting, you had to soften your gaze and look through this to see the real picture. Really cool.

[Kelly Lynn Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn't. I couldn't finish it. It's not a novel, but a collection of two-page flash fiction pieces arranged by topic. So, there are the "Floods," and the "Failures" and a bunch of ones titled "We?" etc. Each story in that section is titled "We? #1," "We? #2," so on and so forth.

The reasons I didn't like this book are as follows:

1: Each story is approximately the same length. Super monotonous.
2: The prose gets super over-wrought in that annoying high-brow literary way that's trying so hard to be clever and failing so hard.
3: Although the stories are arranged by theme, there's really nothing to connect them. Who's this "they" who is happy? I have no idea. Lame.
4: Often, the stories aren't stories. They are descriptions of random stuff, or... nothing, really.
5: The author likes to throw Bob Dylan's name around a lot. Why? What does this accomplish? Nothing, except to annoy me.

Ultimately, I feel like this book is trying too damn hard, and falls short of any kind of emotion. Even as a concept book it falls short, because there's nothing to hold up the concept.

[Wendy G · Rating 1 out of 5]

I confess: I did not finish this book. I did enjoy Helen Phillips' writing, and the imagery that she used throughout this innovative novel. You can read from the descriptions of "And Yet They Were Happy": each vignette is just two pages long, and they're organized by theme. Very original concept. However, I did find that after a while, I lost interest in the concept and I was yearning for something to tie it all together. It wasn't there.

[Neko~chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quirky, imaginative flash fiction. Really good pre-writing warmup reads.

[Zack Reese · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read many, many books but I'm pretty sure this is my first review and moving forward, I'll only be reviewing books I've read from May 2017 onward. (At least for now.) This is legit not my type of book, usually I lean more towards YA, but it's cool because it's split into multiple mini-stories that aren't exactly connected and only last for two pages. It's something to leave on the coffee table and read when you're bored, but I wouldn't recommend reading the entire thing in like 2 days as I did. It's certainly easy to do so, but don't. Let this one slow burn. Helen wrote some great stories, but I wasn't crazy about it.

[Erica Spangler · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't finish this one. It was too much like a book of poetry but not. I want a book I can invest in and this didn't offer me that. The only section I liked was "Floods" and that was the first one. Maybe come back to it...

[Bruja Ha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two-page vignettes like passing surrealist dreams fill the pages of this unusual book.

I loved some and felt meh about others. You will likely feel the same way, but make wholly different choices about which go into which category. So it's a compelling creation.

The ones that urged me to dog-ear them to read again are: envy #3 & 4, mistake #3, #4 & #5, bride #3, haunting #3, monster #1, #2, regime #1, punishment #3, drought #6, helen #4 & 10.

Full of hope are punishment #3 & bride #3.
The best and scariest in a supernatural sense (my favorite) is monster #2.
helen #10 poignantly wraps up the entire thing in a way that elicits tears of both sadness and beauty.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I may come back to this book and finish the second half of stories. I like the first half, but I am setting it aside for easier reading and more fulsome stories. I love short stories, but sometimes they make you work really hard to figure out what is going on. I'm not in a place where I want to work that hard over and over again in short two to four page stories.

[Carol Ann Sahady · Rating 1 out of 5]

but I wasn’t

I always start a new book with excitement over what I might find. This time I found numerous very short little stories of very random thoughts. I do not recommend this book unless you are looking for very short little stories of random thoughts.

[Raluca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetic vignettes arranged in a "variations on a theme" structure. Readers expecting a plot will not like this - but, somehow, neither will readers expecting "pure" poetry, as there is, somehow, some action.

[maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, interesting, engrossing, a little devastating

[Alicia Farmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the end I just wanted to be done with this book. But along the way I felt truly inspired and impressed by Phillips' gift for telling stories in two pages. Some sweet, some harrowing, some mysterious, some mundane, many with a surreal element. She makes these distillations look effortless.

[Jan Moens · Rating 5 out of 5]

9/10

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seriously wonderful. This book is marvelous. Humane, beautifully observed, and funny! Full of wonderfully crafted sentences and paragraphs, such a work. All about love and family and marriage and houses and communities and time, but I’ll pick out these two excerpts on America.

From “envy #2”:

The colonists on the ship that brought the first honey-bees to the New World suffered a worse passage than all other colonists. In addition to everything–stenches, storms, sunburns, hunger, thirst, constipation, nostalgia, insomnia, uncertainty, cold moons on black waters, the desperate yearning for sugar, the infuriating weight of one’s body, its tyrannical needs, how heavily it moors one to the stinking wooden boards,preventing one from experiencing other, more abstract desires–they’re subjected to bee-stings, most earthbound and gardenbound of sufferings, a pain historically mitigated by the aroma of peaches, grass, dirt, roses, usually forgotten by the time the sunbeams turn to honey, warmly recalled as the worst mishap of a perfect day (and anyhow aren’t honeybees responsible for peaches, roses, the metaphor of honey?), but there’s nothing in this waterbound world to mitigate the pain, and so they howl, howl until gender and age vanish and each becomes just a creature, howling. Meanwhile, a tiny golden carcass falls to the salty boards.

More thoughts here:
http://alisonkinney.com/2015/07/26/he...

Thanks!

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this book when I heard Phillips briefly describe her method for writing it (writing a short story each day that had to be exactly 382(?) words long).

The organization, concepts, and word choices were such delightful surprises. I look forward to reading it again!

[ILoveBooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays describes the loneliness, courtship, marriage, and life building of a young couple. These narratives of day dreams and nightmares may be difficult for the reader to enter into at first; but then, one of the essays will touch your heart. The reader may feel that the author has illustrated a part of their lives with surprising clarity. For instance, “failure #1” captures the essence of knowing or not knowing simply how to live. And “envy #4” explains a feeling that many might have considered frivolous;”those who achieve even five minutes of such perfection-mediated or no-deserve our envy.”
Adult readers will find essays in the collection which enlighten their own thoughts and feelings in entertaining, lyrical prose.

[Corby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some really good short pieces that spoke my language, many that made me think "eh?" after reading. Enough "eh?" pieces later and I was just skipping merrily through the book looking for the gems. A few evenings' worth of reading and I was taking it back to the library. So it goes... so it goes...

[Lacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of short stories and flash fiction. Some parts are quite fantastic while others are just over the line of speculative fiction. You could potentially read this in a day, if you felt so inclined, and I would love to discuss which stories stood out beyond the others.
A little bit fairy tale, a little bit whimsy, a little bit dark, and thoroughly enjoyable.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of very short, somewhat connected stories. Some are funny, some are sad, some are scary, and some are wistful. No need to read in order - just let the book open and start reading. Impact changes depending on order the reading is done. How many Helen Phillips are there?

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautiful book, with so much emotion contained in such short vignettes. Not every tale resonated with me, but the ones that did made me think long and hard, and it is very likely that upon reading it again in a few years, different stories will affect me.

[Maria Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Each has been feeling apocalyptic lately, and brave.”

“If only this planet could be trusted. If only these deserts would stop spreading. If only my daughter were here among us already, because I am no longer certain of anything.”

[Jennifer Haydon · Rating 5 out of 5]

hilarious.

[Shannon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't get into this one. The stories were a bit too choppy for me to follow so I will have to reshelf this one and try it again later.

[Fenixbird SandS]

TNBBC BOM JULY READ

[Loelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Each chapter is interesting on it's own, yet I was always left wanting more. So no, I wasn't happy.