The Infinite Mind: "Spectacular Happiness"

In his best selling Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer asked how much happiness we have a right to expect, and how quickly we should demand it. In Should You Leave? he questioned whether trading up has replaced loyalty in intimate relationships. Critics have praised his intellect and writing, comparing him to Roth and Updike, and have anticipated his turn to fiction.

Now Kramer has made that transition. Spectacular Happiness is a daring, controversial novel about what constitutes the good life. Chip Samuels is a community college teacher and handyman on Cape Cod, loyal to the radical values his wife, Anais, introduced him to in the sixties. A patient husband and, above all, a loving father, his world has been shattered by Anais's decision to run off with their son in search of a more conventional life devoted to getting and spending.

Spectacular Happiness opens when Chip is named as the chief suspect in a series of anarchist bombings of beachfront trophy homes. Meticulously planned, announced with fireworks, these explosions have caught the public imagination, and the irony is that Chip, now an outlaw-celebrity, is drawn into the publicity-based culture he is aiming to disrupt. His response: to assemble a memoir for his estranged son, a father's attempt to explain his motivations before the media distorts them.

Chip has splendid allies: Sukey Kuykendahl, an upper-class Realtor with weaknesses for alcohol and overbearing men; Wendy Moro, a self-effacing defense attorney thrust into the limelight; and Manny Abelman, an aging psychotherapist disenchanted with his profession. But it is Chip's own voice that dominates the novel, concerned, searching, painfully aware of the absurd behaviors love can demand.

Darkly intelligent, Spectacular Happiness will alter the way we look both at oversized beachfront mansions and at the culture that spawns them, the culture Chip calls the society of the spectacle. Provocative, compelling, stunning in its execution, this is the masterful first novel that Kramer's nonfiction has led his readers and reviewers to expect.

Praise for "Spectacular Happiness":

"Kramer has a knack for provoking with refreshingly unembarrassed-and often explosive-intellect. -- Los Angeles Times

"You could say that Spectacular Happiness makes for explosive beach reading. It's about an eco-terrorist who blows up shorefront mansions on Cape Cod. The effect is something like reading "Jaws" from the shark's point of view. . . . It's wacky and wicked and brilliant -the sort of novel you want to argue with and about. (Attention, book clubs.) By the end, Kramer has set off explosives throughout the structure of our consumer culture and everything feels dangerously unstable." -- Christian Science Monitor

"It's da bomb . . . a serious novel of ideas . . . the intellectual conflicts lend the book all the tension anybody should need." -- Newsweek

"Peter D. Kramer will always be known as the author of Listening to Prozac . . . But if he doesn't become known, too, for Spectacular Happiness, that will not be the fault of this daring first novel. Starting with the fact that it is fiction, Spectacular Happiness defies our expectations of Kramer. It breathes life into a certain kind of radical politics in a way that makes you wish Kramer had tried fiction sooner. None of our more practiced leftish novelists-including Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and E.L. Doctorow-has generated as tantalizing a vision of contemporary radicalism minus dogma. . . . This elegantly crafted novel restores faith in politics." -- The American Prospect

"It is a first-person narrative as distinctly American as Holden Caulfield's or Huckleberry Finn's. But because this is the voice of an adult, it is more modulated by compassion, irritation, hard-won wisdom and enduring love. Kramer weaves sex, politics, philosophy, scores of literary references, and dazzling pyrotechnic displays into this tale. . . this novel is a feast of big ideas, memorable characters and heroic actions. It is a phenomenal fiction debut." -- Seattle Times

"The voice-measured, pensive, soft-spoken, self-deprecating, lightly ironic, quizzically humane-recalls the early Walker Percy. Just think what Binx Bolling might have made of himself if he'd quit going to the movies and started blowing up his neighbors' houses instead." -- Kirkus

"Good fun . . . rewarding surprises . . . like a rich series of therapy sessions, filled with slow shifts in self-awareness . . . For those of us who delight in practicing amateur analysis, Spectacular Happiness provides the rare opportunity to do it with a beguiling subject [Chip Samuels] and an expert guide [Kramer]." -- New York Times Book Review

"The plot of a political thriller, the biting wisdom of a satire: Spectacular Happiness [is] the delightful first novel of Peter D. Kramer, who in 1993 established his credentials as one of the most influential and erudite voices in contemporary American psychiatry with Listening to Prozac. With this riveting and darkly funny novel that is nothing less than a subversive look at fin-de-siècle American culture, he demonstrates that he is a novelist of significant talent, as well. . . . In an era increasingly scarred by terrorism of all kinds, Spectacular Happiness is more than just a witty, compelling work of fiction: It is an important commentary on the twin spectacles of greed and rage that have overtaken our age." -- Forward

"Intriguing . . . Kramer is once again challenging our beliefs about the fixedness of both moral principles and human personality. . . a stop on the journey of a renaissance intellect." -- Chronicle of Higher Education.