A Guide to a Happier Life: A Self-Help Novel

by A. Drennan

Liz knew it would be the story of a lifetime, but was it worth dying for?Elizabeth Kohen, a young journalist trapped in a dead end job, takes on an assignment that she thinks could be the story of a lifetime. Desperate for a sense of professional fulfillment, she flies to New Mexico to meet a man who vanished decades ago.Raymond Kowalski was an internationally renowned artist, loved and loathed by thousands, until he orchestrated his own disappearance. Now he’s an aging squatter in New Mexico’s back country, with no family, friends, or legal identity. In Elizabeth, he sees an opportunity that he can’t resist; the chance to be the author of his own legacy.Their plans suddenly crumble after a run-in with INS forces them to flee into the wilderness. Lost, they must now not only elude the law, but also struggle for their lives against the unforgiving desert.

177 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 28, 2015

About the author

Allison Drennan is an author, artist, student, and working stiff living in Bellingham, Washington, with her two elderly cats. She recently released her debut novel, A Guide to a Happier Life. When she is not writing, working, or in class, she enjoys knitting, hiking, cooking, and the consumption of both coffee and beer.

Allison is also one half of the two woman team behind Barely Salvageable Press, a nascent force in indie publishing.

Reviews

[Robert Lashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4 and 1/2 stars)

If novels are there not to give answers but provide questions, then A Guide To A Happier Life has a rental car full of them. Allison Drennan's tale of Elizabeth Cohen's journalistic profile of/anti odyssey with Raymond Kowalski is staked un an unclassifiable place. Is it a complex tale about art, fame, creation and the lure to control one's public image? Or is it a subtle satire of all those things? Is it a travel narrative? Or a deconstruction of a travel narrative? Is it a very edgy, very modern bildungsroman where a young writer achieves receives a complex sense or awareness? Or is it something that flips the literary conceit darkly enough to rumble with Malcolm Lowry at his most macabre?

My answer: how about all of the above? Drennan weaves in between these categories so fluidly in Life, and does so in two ways. First, with one of the most believable two person character dynamics I have read in a modern novel. Cohen, a freelance writer with a very complex and very believable sense of misanthropy and idealism, finagles an assignment to cover Raymond Kowalski, an ex art world badboy whose swagger has subtly has ate away at his soul like a cocaine tooth.

Drennan's subtle gestures have great power in the first part of the book: where a minor novelist would easily churn out rehashed Bukowski with those character, she starts the book with the quiet stern pace. In Cohen's eyes, the figure of Kowalski is that of an electric trickster; a known unknown has been in her imagination since she was an student and a subject that could bring her more glory than the dreariness of her job (if she can write a piece on him). In Kowalski's eyes, Cohen is both a way for him to rewrite his story and-only in his very decayed mind-a Daemon of the spotlight reappearing in the flesh.

And they live on the page. If you have read a web mag worth it's salt, Cohen's mixture of guts, vulnerability, chops and inexperience will leap at you. If you have any familiarity with Artforum or any bad boy of the month that they fetishize then discard, Kowalski's neuroses and demons will be as real as the sea air. The questions in their interplay and darkly unexpected detours/descents make the novel work for me. What does fame mean? How does art excite the soul and does it bring out the best and worst of a person? Does living on as a creator of work matter?
Did I forgot something? Yes: If you are tired of twee post modernist hipsters who like to overwrite and mistake giving all of their characters bad mothers for character development, A Guide To A Happier Life is your book. Sleek, disciplined, minimalist old school novels with every word thought through might be an outdated taste now, but goddammit, it sure as hell is mine. If I’m not mistaken, you can get it on kindle for free. But if you want to support the arts an want to read a great novel, run to kindle and check this out.

[Tiger Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a weird beautiful fever dream of a novel that truly has no wrong notes, hence the five-star review. The author does a masterful job of keeping Liz and Ray on equal footing, no easy task when one is female, the other male, considering how many narratives there are that show the woman in a subservient position. It is a book where one tends to see a special, unique picture depending on who the reader is, like trying to pick out the lines of your own face in the water. I am still trying to decide whether this story is about everything, or nothing, or both at different times. Like the iridescence on a soap bubble, there are flashes of sexism, art, the power (or lack thereof) in the written word, whether one can or should escape society and more to be discovered here.

My only minor criticisms are 1) I am not sure the concept of interweaving pieces of the story at non-linear times is needed. I think that any tale about venturing into the lands away from what we so arrogantly refer to as civilization by nature starts to become less linear (or not linear at all) but this is abandoned at some point about halfway through so it makes me wonder if it was really utilized to the level it could have been, and 2) it may be that Ray is allowed to go on philosophizing a tiny bit too long at places, though I did find myself getting fed up right when Liz did which was a great thing.

[Jen Mccorkle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This author loves the desert. No one who doesn't could paint it so vividly. I've actually driven Highway 70 outside of Las Cruces, and the descriptions bring me back there so well I can almost smell it.

It's hard to be specific without giving spoilers, but I will say that Ray Kowalski is a character who will stick in my head for a long time to come. This is one of those books that you finish and find yourself wanting to sit down and talk about with someone else who's read it.

Not my usual cup of tea, but a worthy read. Will keep on my shelf.

[Dani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got sucked in! And that's good! Interesting characters. Well worth the read. Don't want to spoil it but the ending was not what I was expecting but it worked.