the promise of happiness book review

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

A- : very fine family novel

See our review for fuller assessment.

   Review Consensus :   Not quite a consensus, but most very impressed    From the Reviews : "(D)ry, witty, but achy (.....) There is an air of desperation that hangs over the novel, but Cartwright is always slyly sympathetic to his characters and it's almost impossible not to become engrossed by the Judds and to root for them to achieve some sort of redemption." - Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor "Cartwright studiously avoids glib optimism, but it's clear from a relatively early stage that the novel's title isn't ironically intended. (...) Cartwright is a writer of considerable distinction and some of his characteristic strengths are traceable here -- most notably an eye for the minutiae of human behaviour and an ear finely attuned to the quirks and absurdities of contemporary speech. But judged by the high standards he has set himself, this is a rather disappointing novel." - Jem Poster, The Guardian "Cartwright generally achieves the fine balance of seeming both accessible and profound, mixing plot strands about Manhattan art theft, internet start-ups and Cornish cooking disasters with remarkable fluency." - Alfred Hickling, The Guardian "(A) beautifully observed, emotionally detailed novel about one family's decline and regeneration (.....) (A)n elegant if flawed novel that threads the comic and the tragic together into story that, at its best, is as affecting as it is gripping." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "I am hopeful that his bitingly funny and fiercely observed new novel, which won Britain's Hawthornden Prize and the South African Sunday Times' Literary Award, will open up a new readership on this side of the Atlantic. The Promise of Happiness is a sharp-eyed portrait of a contemporary English family whose members are each unhappy in his or her own way. (...) With a few minor lapses (...), Cartwright's novel is wonderfully well written. The savage irony and probing moral questioning nicely balance each other out, and as an exploration of contemporary Englishness -- "proud, ironic and ridiculous all at once" -- it is unsurpassed." - Tony Eprile, The New York Times Book Review "Perhaps it takes a South African novelist to describe an English middle-class family in such compendiously unironic detail. Cartwright never flinches; we often do. (...) This is a depressed book, its world view rancid and not easily redeemed." - Kate Kellaway, The Observer "This is a riveting, pitch-perfect exploration of the fine line that exists between tragedy and the English middle-class tradition of muddling along." - Simon Beckett, The Observer "The novel is busy with themes of guilt, redemption, morality and responsibility, but the characterisation is Cartwright�s great achievement. The five narrative voices are convincing and accomplished, with Charles the most successful character. (...) There are irritations, but they are minor. (...) But these are quibbles. The Promise of Happiness is a touching, beautifully observed novel written with precision and sympathy." - Olivia Glazebrook, The Spectator "Justin Cartwright's latest novel, The Promise of Happiness , is a lot better than good enough. The elegant assurance of its opening pages induces in the reader an almost incredulous admiration -- as for some astonishing feat of physical strength and grace -- that lasts right to the final sentence. (...) Cartwright beautifully and inexorably constructs a tragedy of noble reticence and oddness, in which even hope (for hope remains, at the bottom of the box, when all the sorrow and wickedness has emerged) has a changeling aspect." - Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph "Not the least of the achievements of The Promise of Happiness is in bringing into focus one sector of a fluid, bewildering and shallow society in which the nature of the shallowness is constantly shifting and adapting. (...) But the ending fails to bring together all the threads of a readable and adroitly observant narrative with quite the gravity and conviction the author intends." - Alan Brownjohn, Times Literary Supplement Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

     After a year in New York she knew her way around Manhattan and Long Island including Brooklyn and further afield up into the Bronx and Queens.

"We want your side of the story, exclusively, and of course we will pay."

About the Author :

       Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and educated in the United States and England. He has written several novels. In Every Face I Meet was shortlisted for the 1995 Booker Award, and Leading the Cheers won the 1998 Whitbread Award.

© 2006 the complete review Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links

Advertisement

Supported by

'The Promise of Happiness,' by Justin Cartwright

Redemption Value

• Share full article

By Tony Eprile

• Jan. 8, 2006

THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS

By Justin Cartwright.

308 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/

St. Martin's Press. $23.95.

Justin Cartwright is surprisingly little known in the United States, although in England he is frequently mentioned alongside authors like Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Kazuo Ishiguro. I am hopeful that his bitingly funny and fiercely observed new novel, which won Britain's Hawthornden Prize and the South African Sunday Times' Literary Award, will open up a new readership on this side of the Atlantic.

"The Promise of Happiness" is a sharp-eyed portrait of a contemporary English family whose members are each unhappy in his or her own way. The linchpin of the family is Juliet Judd (Ju-Ju), who is just being released from an American prison after serving two years for fencing a Tiffany window. Ju-Ju had been the blessed, prodigal daughter who had gone from Oxford to the Courtauld Institute of Art and then on to wealth, fame and the Upper East Side after publishing the definitive book on Tiffany windows. She had believed in art as "evidence of human striving for the impossible," sharing Malraux's view of art as a revolt against destiny. "But somehow fate got me by the throat anyway," she says. "Art was no help." The courtroom scenes, recounted in flashback, are written as comic theater, complete with a humorous career criminal straight out of "Goodfellas" whose testimony cast Ju-Ju in the role of an upper-crust mastermind who thinks herself above the law -- a sort of Martha Stewart of the art world -- though there is some doubt whether any actual theft took place. But the shocking violation Ju-Ju experienced in prison (mostly shown offstage) is moving and disturbing, the one aspect of the story that Cartwright wisely recognizes cannot be treated with gentle British irony.

There is an old-fashioned Christian morality play half hidden beneath this witty family saga, for each of the Judds can be seen as worshiping false gods and being punished accordingly. Charles, the once suave and debonair paterfamilias, has lost his high-level accounting job in a corporate merger, his reinstatement lawsuit failing because of his excessive fondness for young trainees and secretaries, and now he is unmanned and increasingly unmoored. He has a tendency to speak his thoughts out loud, interjecting his rude opinions of others' silly prattle about investments and parties. His wife, Daphne, has given herself to domesticity, making a hilarious mess out of the celebrity chef Rick Stein's recipes for mackerel, which in her version comes to look "like a swab from an operating theater." Twenty-eight-year-old Charlie is decent and solid and is about to be very rich from his online clothing company, sock-it-to-me.com, which sells throwaway socks for businessmen. But he doesn't love Ana, the South American beauty he's about to marry. She has the air of "an extravagantly healthy animal, like one of those racehorses you see at Ascot" -- and is carrying his child -- and he is repelled by her taste for extravagantly expensive clothes. Sophie, the youngest, is caught up in sex, drugs and advertising, where her job includes supplying cocaine to visiting Italian clients who consider the sleazy, married middle-aged boss with whom she has been having a tired affair to be a genius because he can make the image of a dolphin morph into an Alfa Romeo.

The elder Judds have retired to Trebetherick in Cornwall, where the former poet laureate Sir John Betjeman is buried. Betjeman was Britain's most popular 20th-century poet, his work filled with nostalgia for Englishness while gently poking fun at a nation that "stands for / Books from Boots and country lanes, / Free speech, free passes, class distinction, / Democracy and proper drains." Irascible and slightly bonkers, with his once lush "Ted Hughes hair" now limp and "the color of what's in a cuspidor," Charles habitually walks the route immortalized in Betjeman's "Trebetherick." The pressure of his aging prostate coincides with his arrival at the churchyard, and watering the best-selling poet's grave has become part of his ritual. Daphne has found purpose in flower arranging for St. Enodoc, the church celebrated in the poet's work, and in her conversations with "the beardy vicar." A pale form of belief is quietly seeping into her soul, even though she recognizes that for many the "church has very little to do with God." Instead, "it's more a shrine to Englishness: flowers, history, familiar -- if meaningless -- hymns."

Daphne insists that Charlie and Ana get married at St. Enodoc, throwing herself into planning an extravagant flower arrangement, with garlands covering the arch where the bridal couple will enter the church and more flowers to welcome the "best man, who is also his sister, the prodigal daughter." "The flowers, their lavishness and beauty, are our family statement . . . of redemption." It is significant that the supposedly stolen Tiffany window -- and the stained glass windows at St. Enodoc -- portray the resurrection.

Although the humor is sharper-edged, the novel follows Betjeman in both extolling and mocking the values, virtues and pleasures of the English: dogs, gardening, pubs, beautiful old churches by the coast and the belief -- instilled in Charles "by school, postwar dreariness, and by his father" -- that "drudgery was noble," since it "was necessary for country and family." However much the plot twists upend this last notion, the novel moves toward the restoration of "some lost sense of rightness."

With a few minor lapses (the American dialogue reads like an Englishman's journal of odd phrases and lame mispronunciations like "Yurp" for Europe), Cartwright's novel is wonderfully well written. The savage irony and probing moral questioning nicely balance each other out, and as an exploration of contemporary Englishness -- "proud, ironic and ridiculous all at once" -- it is unsurpassed.

'The Promise of Happiness,' by Justin Cartwright Tony Eprile is the author of "The Persistence of Memory," which was awarded the 2005 Koret Jewish Book Prize for fiction.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

• Advertisers
• Agents and Vendors
• Book Authors and Editors
• Booksellers / Media / Review Copies
• Librarians and Consortia
• Journal Authors and Editors
• Licensing and Subsidiary Rights
• Mathematics Authors and Editors
• Prospective Journals
• Scholarly Publishing Collective
• Explore Subjects
• Authors and Editors
• Society Members and Officers
• Prospective Societies

Open Access

• Job Opportunities

The Promise of Happiness

Author: Sara Ahmed

Subjects Gender and Sexuality , Theory and Philosophy > Feminist Theory , Cultural Studies

“ The Promise of Happiness is a wonderfully written book we would recommend to anyone working at the intersections of philosophy, anti-racism, and critical race studies, as well as both gender and cultural studies, and, of course, those involved in the field of happiness studies and positive psychology. . . . [W]e have appreciated The Promise of Happiness in its ability to speak to us on a personal level. Thus, being moved, intrigued, and stimulated by this book, we can say that we are happy with it.” — Krizia Nardini and Matilda Lindgren, Nora

“ The Promise of Happiness features a series of creative hermeneutic adventures that Ahmed describes quite simply as a matter of 'reading’ certain visual and textual archives. Her own ‘readings’ of cultural objects and events, mediated as they are through her personal and political experience, throw into relief the productive capacities of such practices of meaning-creation that we all can and do engage in with the texts, tales, images, performances, and cases to which we give new expression in and through our engagement with them. While her interpretive dance between these texts is far more fast and loose than is the familiar academic custom, it provides an invigorating spectacle, all the while inviting its readers to reflect on the many archives we traverse in our affected lives and respective disciplines.” — Margaret Denike, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

“ The Promise of Happiness is an extraordinary text that should become a mainstay of affect studies and that serves as a strikingly powerful model of astute cultural critique. Ahmed offers an insightful study of our preoccupation with and desire for happiness.” — Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, Women's Studies Quarterly

“Expand[s] the political horizons of feeling and cultural politics with exciting complexity . . . brilliant.” — Sarah Cefai, Cultural Studies Review

“[W]hat makes Ahmed’s book so readable, and so read worthy, is that it is like the best forms of comedy. The kind of comedy that makes you laugh not because you have never experienced the kind of thing being described but, rather, because the thing being described is so common, so familiar, so ordinary, and yet by its rendering the comedian has refracted that experience through another lens. One that shows up the way things might be.” — Kim Brooks, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

“By unpacking the attribution of happiness to specific choices and lives, Ahmed encourages us to consider how ‘the promise of happiness’ serves as a moral imperative. A stimulating and—dare I say—pleasurable read, the book may not have a happy ending, but it does propose what might happen instead.” — Kestryl Cael Lowrey, Lambda Literary Review

“Engaging with a rich history of literature, theory, and film, Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness highlights the myriad ways in which happiness has been used to form our desires, goals, and aspirations. Throughout the book, Ahmed insightfully points to the ways in which the promise of happiness dictates how we live and, more importantly, how the path to this ideal is often fraught with much unhappiness for those who experience oppression and injustice.” — Kira Tomsons, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

“For anyone interested in Feminist Theory or Feminist Philosophy this book should be most interesting, and for those engaged in Cultural Studies this book offers an exciting study of alternative theories of emotion.” — Jenell Navarro, Women's Studies

“Fresh in its premises and elegant in its follow-through, with plenty of incisive questions to move it along, The Promise of Happiness offers new lenses on an emotion rarely challenged. I suggest you make room for it on your shelf.” — Vani Natarajan, Feminist Review blog

“Many things from The Promise of Happiness will stay with me—indeed, her call for the ‘freedom to be unhappy’ may paralyze me as I next inscribe a friend’s birthday card. However, the most salient of these may be a heightened alertness to the conditions of possibility, the sense that happenings arise from complex facilitating elements.” — Robert Leckey, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

“The promise of happiness is useful for queer theorists, feminists (of various persuasions) and critical race theorists who are interested in exploring the place that the politics of unhappiness continues to hold in discourses about a more ethical world. Students who are coming to queer, feminist and critical race studies would also benefit from this book, especially as it traverses three study areas, drawing on many philosophers and key theorists along the way. Its use of texts and film to contextualise quite abstract and complex ideas around (un)happiness and affect also makes it a good read for students.” — Elizabeth Smith, Culture, Health & Sexuality

“There is an immediate appeal to work which so overtly brings happiness to the killjoys and melancholics, usually excluded from communities of happiness. It is the appeal of identification, however, which risks replicating the exclusions of which it complains. In this case, however, Ahmed’s killing joy should appeal not only to those who identify with her figures, but to those who are interested in philosophical and rigorous ethical debates.” — Carolyn Broomhead, Women: A Cultural Review

“This is a daring but welcome challenge in the context of a mainstream liberal metropolitan global north that celebrates the political achievements and legal changes for queer life as welcoming former sexual dissidents into the norm…. It offers is a counter-argument to dominant discourses about happiness and those who are seen to spoil it.” — Shamira A. Meghani, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“Fascinating and important, both in showing us how to read some key texts differently and in showing how to think more carefully about happiness and its politics. . . . [T]here is a perverse happiness to be taken from reading such an interesting book about the insufficiency of happiness.” — Richard Ashcroft, Textual Practice

“T he Promise of Happiness is richly valuable not only for its discussion of utilitarianism but also for its broader deconstruction of the workings of happiness in a range of works of philosophy, literature, and social science. Whereas other feminist theorists also occasionally cast a critical eye toward happiness, or raise consciousness of female unhappiness, Ahmed has produced a volume that is unparalleled in its sustained and extensive expose´ of the entanglements between discourses of happiness and oppression.” — Andrea Veltman, Hypatia

“ The Promise of Happiness bridges philosophy and cultural studies, phenomenology and feminist thought—providing a fresh and incisive approach to some of the most urgent contemporary feminist issues. Ahmed navigates this bridge with a voice both clear and warm to convey ideas that are as complex as they are intimate and accessible. Her treatment of affect as a phenomenological project provides feminist theorists a way out of mind-body divides without reverting to essentialisms, enabling Ahmed to attend to intersectional and global power relations with acuity and originality.” — Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Signs

“Ahmed enhances feminism’s critical toolbox by guiding us to regard affect as a cipher for society as we track how it produces and is produced by politics. ... Ahmed draws on feminism to potentially enhance the quality of life for her readers, who are offered mindful practices of relinquishing attachment to various ideals in a text that is neither Pollyannaish nor depressing.” — Naomi Greyser, Feminist Studies

“Ahmed’s analyses are spot-on and provocative. . . . Ahmed’s analysis of this and other topics is unpredictable and engaging.” — Heather Seggel, Gay & Lesbian Review

“Ahmed's language is a joy, and her work on each case study is filled with insight and rigor as she doggedly traces the social networks of dominance concealed and congealed around happiness. . . . The Promise of Happiness is an important intervention in affect studies that crucially approaches one of the major assumptions guiding social life: the assumption that we need to be happy.” — Sean Grattan, Social Text

“At a time when happiness studies are all the rage and feminism is accused of destroying women’s happiness, Sara Ahmed offers a bold critique of the consensus that happiness is an unconditional good. Her new book asks searching questions about the nature of the good life, making its case in a wonderfully pellucid prose. What a paradox that a defense of the kill-joy should be such a pleasure to read! This timely, original, and intellectually expansive book is sure to trigger a great deal of debate.” — Rita Felski, University of Virginia

“What could be more naturalized and less subject to ideological critique than happiness? How are we to get critical perspective on it? Through her readings of texts and films, Sara Ahmed shows how this might work. By revealing the complexity and ambivalence of happiness, she intervenes in several fields—including queer and feminist theory, affect studies, and critical race theory—in a genuinely new and exciting way.” — Heather K. Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

• Buy the e-book: Amazon Kindle Apple iBooks Barnes & Noble nook Google Play Kobo
• Author/Editor Bios
• Table of Contents
• Additional Information

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others , also published by Duke University Press; The Cultural Politics of Emotion ; Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality ; and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism .

If you are requesting permission to photocopy material for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com;

If the Copyright Clearance Center cannot grant permission, you may request permission from our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).

If you are requesting permission to reprint DUP material (journal or book selection) in another book or in any other format, contact our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).

Many images/art used in material copyrighted by Duke University Press are controlled, not by the Press, but by the owner of the image. Please check the credit line adjacent to the illustration, as well as the front and back matter of the book for a list of credits. You must obtain permission directly from the owner of the image. Occasionally, Duke University Press controls the rights to maps or other drawings. Please direct permission requests for these images to [email protected] . For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department .

If you're interested in a Duke University Press book for subsidiary rights/translations, please contact [email protected] . Include the book title/author, rights sought, and estimated print run.

Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here .

Email: [email protected] Email contact for coursepacks: [email protected] Fax: 919-688-4574 Mail: Duke University Press Rights and Permissions 905 W. Main Street Suite 18B Durham, NC 27701

1. Author's name. If book has an editor that is different from the article author, include editor's name also. 2. Title of the journal article or book chapter and title of journal or title of book 3. Page numbers (if excerpting, provide specifics) For coursepacks, please also note: The number of copies requested, the school and professor requesting For reprints and subsidiary rights, please also note: Your volume title, publication date, publisher, print run, page count, rights sought

This book is subject to the standard Duke University Press rights and permissions.

Sara Ahmed is the recipient of the 2017 Kessler Award, presented by CLAGS

Winner, 2011 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Book Award

• Bk Cover Image Full
• Also Viewed
• Also Purchased

Staying with the Trouble

The Dancer's Voice

Cruel Optimism

Marx for Cats

How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind

Necropolitics

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

Sex Scandal

The Right to Maim

Living a Feminist Life

Queer Phenomenology

What's the Use?

Willful Subjects

• Bookreporter
• ReadingGroupGuides
• AuthorsOnTheWeb

The Book Report Network

Sign up for our newsletters!

Regular Features

Author spotlights, "bookreporter talks to" videos & podcasts, "bookaccino live: a lively talk about books", favorite monthly lists & picks, seasonal features, book festivals, sports features, bookshelves.

• Coming Soon

Newsletters

• Weekly Update
• On Sale This Week
• Spring Preview
• Winter Reading
• Holiday Cheer
• Fall Preview
• Summer Reading

Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the promise of happiness.

There are many different types of "family novels" being written in today's insular world, and sadly not all of them are worth reading. There are those that read like personal memoirs --- maudlin accounts of dysfunctional upbringings and unforgotten family rifts that often sound like the author is using his or her writing to work through psychological problems left over from childhood (i.e. whining). There are also those that boast an overarching theory about The State of The Contemporary Family and a ripped-apart value system without really delivering a graspable narrative. And then there are those that, despite their minor flaws, deliver an amicable mix of engrossing story and "state-of-things philosophizing" so that by the time the book has concluded, its readers feel that they not only have had an entertaining and informative look-see into someone else's family life, but that they have also realized a thing or two about their own.

Man Booker-shortlisted and Whitbread-winning author Justin Cartwright's latest offering is thankfully the latter of the three. A slow-to-unfold yet rightfully deliberate stroll through the contours of human suffering and a story that recognizes the importance of hope as an offset to seemingly irreversible tragedy, THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS describes one family's pieced-together attempt at redemption following a far-reaching misfortune that threatens to break them apart permanently.

At 32, Juliet Judd is at the height of her life. She has a cheeky, hip gallery-owner boyfriend, a gorgeous Upper East Side apartment, an Oxford education and a prestigious job at the preeminent Christie's in New York. In the midst of it all, she is convicted of an alleged crime --- it is questionable whether she plays an active part in it or not --- and is sentenced to what turns out to be three years in prison. The fact that there were others responsible for stealing and reselling the Tiffany's glass window is beside the point, according to the court. She is the one who wrote the checks. She is the one with the prestigious reputation. She is the one who must take the fall.

In her absence, the Judd family silently unravels --- each in their own twisted struggle to reconcile the condemnation of their prodigal daughter/sister. Her father Charles loses his business as well as his grasp on reality, withering away into a frail shadow of his former self. Her mother Daphne realizes the depths of her unhappiness and tries to fill the seemingly endless empty hours with pointless cooking classes and gardening. Her sister Sophie drops out of school, starts doing drugs, and has an affair with her boss, twenty years her senior. Her brother Charlie, despite becoming successful in a burgeoning self-started Internet business, enters into a relationship with a gorgeous yet seemingly vacuous woman, Ana. Although Ana is pregnant and they have plans to marry, it is questionable as to whether or not Charlie actually loves her. Without Ju-Ju to hold the family together, the Judds flounder about, wounded and self-righteous in their efforts to block out what has befallen them.

Fast-forward three years and Juliet is being released from prison. In preparation for her return home, a number of intentional (and unintentional) transformations take place. Charlie plans to go ahead with the wedding and Daphne makes arrangements for an elaborate celebration --- bringing together her old family with the new, all in a blind hope to restore peace and humility to their shattered world. Sophie breaks up with her married boyfriend, takes out her nose ring (a small yet symbolic gesture) and plans to move home for the summer to get her life in gear. Even Charles, although he has the hardest time of it, takes pains to get past his depression enough to forgive his daughter (and himself) for all that has transpired in her absence.

What makes THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS so touching and worthwhile is not so much the actual circumstances of Charlie's, Sophie's, Daphne's, Charles's or Juliet's lives, but how each one deals with the randomness of what happens to them in relation to how they define themselves as individuals and as part of a breathing, functioning family unit in the world. "And so this is life. It is arbitrary; its narrative is erratic. [They] have been given a harsh understanding of the human condition. [They] didn't ask for it, or seek it." But they must keep moving and growing together, nonetheless.

As Tolstoy once wrote as the opening first lines to ANNA KARENINA, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Justin Cartwright's eighth novel is a true testament to the disparaging trials any family might encounter and to what ends they might have to travel to make it through to the other side.

Reviewed by Alexis Burling on January 23, 2011

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright

• Publication Date: July 10, 2007
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• ISBN-10: 1596913797
• ISBN-13: 9781596913790

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Angel falls

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright 298pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99

In his last novel, White Lightning, Justin Cartwright depicted a world so conducive to damage and misery that even the most well-meaning actions prove worse than futile; such consolation as the narrative offered seemed little more than a tentative afterthought. In The Promise of Happiness the suffering of fallen humankind remains very much in evidence, but counterbalanced by recurrent hints of an alternative possibility. Cartwright studiously avoids glib optimism, but it's clear from a relatively early stage that the novel's title isn't ironically intended.

Things haven't been going well for the Judd family. Charles Judd has been ousted from his job and now spends his time in the Cornish village to which he has retired but which has never quite become home, shuttling between his house, the golf course and the pub, seething with resentment. His wife, Daphne, bears the brunt of his frustration as she struggles with complicated fish recipes and a sense of her own inadequacy. Sophie, the youngest child, has been doing drugs since her schooldays and is still fighting an addiction she can't fully acknowledge. Ju-Ju, at one time plotting an impressive trajectory in her chosen career - Oxford, the Courtauld, a job in New York with a prestigious firm of art auctioneers - is serving a two-year prison sentence for authenticating a stolen artwork.

Only their brother, Charlie, might be said to be a success in conventional terms: his dotcom company is about to make him a millionaire and he is on the brink of marriage to Ana, a strikingly beautiful South American who is bearing his child. But he is having second thoughts about marriage to a woman who is spending his money like water and whose charms seem faintly suspect, and though there's never much doubt the wedding will go ahead, it's clear the relationship lacks substance. "In a way," he thinks, "I always wanted to end up with someone like Ju-Ju," and the thought functions as a comment on the unusual intensity of his love for his sister and the inadequacy of his feelings for his wife-to-be.

For Daphne, however, Charlie's wedding - timed to take place shortly after Ju-Ju's release and designed to reunite the scarred members of her family within the walls of the ancient parish church - seems to offer the possibility of resolution. This might appear, on the face of it, an unlikely outcome, but the narrative resonates with intimations of the miraculous - the angelic presences Daphne imagines hearing when she's alone in the church, for example, or the repeated references to the Resurrection. "He is risen": the text is inscribed on the Tiffany window that was the occasion of Ju-Ju's fall from grace, and also, by a coincidence too remarkable to be dismissed, on one of the windows of the church in which the final scene is played out. We're not encouraged to draw simple conclusions, but the prominence given to traditional symbols of renewal and redemption is highly suggestive.

Cartwright is a writer of considerable distinction and some of his characteristic strengths are traceable here - most notably an eye for the minutiae of human behaviour and an ear finely attuned to the quirks and absurdities of contemporary speech. But judged by the high standards he has set himself, this is a rather disappointing novel. Where White Lightning was sharply focused and rich with implied significance, The Promise of Happiness tends towards slackness and banality. Banality is, of course, a feature of the unredeemed world, but this doesn't entirely justify the patches of inert dialogue ("'What a day.' 'It's beautiful.' 'I'm playing golf.' 'Oh good.'") or the relentlessness of circumstantial detail: we're not four pages into the book before we find that Charles cuts his grass with a two-stroke Stratton-engined Hayter 13/40 tractor mower that cost nearly £2,000, not including the optional disk that stops the crankshaft buckling.

This is a pity because Cartwright clearly revels in fresh challenges, and The Promise of Happiness seems to mark an interesting shift of approach. That his achievement fails to match his apparent ambition shouldn't concern us unduly, or prevent us from looking forward to his next novel.

Most viewed

• Architecture and Design
• Asian and Pacific Studies
• Business and Economics
• Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Computer Sciences
• Cultural Studies
• Engineering
• General Interest
• Geosciences
• Industrial Chemistry
• Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Library and Information Science, Book Studies
• Life Sciences
• Linguistics and Semiotics
• Literary Studies
• Materials Sciences
• Mathematics
• Social Sciences
• Sports and Recreation
• Theology and Religion
• Publish your article
• The role of authors
• Promoting your article
• Abstracting & indexing
• Publishing Ethics
• Why publish with De Gruyter
• How to publish with De Gruyter
• Our book series
• Our subject areas
• Your digital product at De Gruyter
• Contribute to our reference works
• Product information
• Tools & resources
• Product Information
• Promotional Materials
• Orders and Inquiries
• FAQ for Library Suppliers and Book Sellers
• Repository Policy
• Free access policy
• Open Access agreements
• Database portals
• For Authors
• Customer service
• People + Culture
• Journal Management
• How to join us
• Working at De Gruyter
• Mission & Vision
• De Gruyter Foundation
• De Gruyter Ebound
• Our Responsibility
• Partner publishers

Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.

The Promise of Happiness

• X / Twitter

Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Copyright year: 2010
• Audience: Professional and scholarly;
• Main content: 326
• Published: April 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9780822392781

The Promise of Happiness

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others , also published by Duke University Press; The Cultural Politics of Emotion ; Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality ; and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism .

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.

Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

• Permissions
• Cite Icon Cite

The Promise of Happiness By: Sara Ahmed https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781 ISBN (print): 978-0-8223-4666-1 ISBN (electronic): 978-0-8223-9278-1 Publisher: Duke University Press Published: 2010

Download citation file:

• Reference Manager

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction : Why Happiness, Why Now? Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-001 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction<span class="subtitle-colon">: </span><span class="subtitle">Why Happiness, Why Now?</span> in another window
• Happy Objects Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-002 Open the PDF Link PDF for Happy Objects in another window
• Feminist Killjoys Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-003 Open the PDF Link PDF for Feminist Killjoys in another window
• Unhappy Queers Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-004 Open the PDF Link PDF for Unhappy Queers in another window
• Melancholic Migrants Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-005 Open the PDF Link PDF for Melancholic Migrants in another window
• Happy Futures Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-006 Open the PDF Link PDF for Happy Futures in another window
• Conclusion Happiness, Ethics, Possibility Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-007 Open the PDF Link PDF for Conclusion Happiness, Ethics, Possibility in another window
• Notes Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-008 Open the PDF Link PDF for Notes in another window
• References Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-009 Open the PDF Link PDF for References in another window
• Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-010 Open the PDF Link PDF for Index in another window
• Copyright © 2024
• Duke University Press
• 905 W. Main St. Ste. 18-B
• Durham, NC 27701
• (888) 651-0122
• International
• +1 (919) 688-5134
• Information For
• Advertisers
• Book Authors
• Booksellers/Media
• Journal Authors/Editors
• Journal Subscribers
• Prospective Journals
• Licensing and Subsidiary Rights
• View Open Positions
• email Join our Mailing List
• catalog Current Catalog
• Accessibility
• Get Adobe Reader

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

2010 Reviews

Review of The Promise of Happiness, by Sara Ahmed

Natarajan, Vani M.

Sara Ahmed asks readers a provocative question: “Do we consent to happiness? And what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?” Ahmed takes on the elusive topic of happiness not to define it, but to look at how it works. Amazingly, this book does not get trapped in abstraction. Sara Ahmed approaches her critique of happiness with explicitly feminist, anti-racist, and queer analysis, always attentive to the historical moment in which she’s writing. She moves through what she calls an “archive of happiness,” comprised of novels, philosophical treatises, films, utopian proposals, and dystopian visions that all deal in some way with happiness.

• Library science

The promise of happiness.

By justin cartwright.

• 2 Want to read
• 0 Currently reading
• 0 Have read

My Reading Lists:

Use this Work

Create a new list

My book notes.

My private notes about this edition:

Buy this book

From award-winner Justin Cartwright, a classic and stunning novel of English life and family love Charles Judd meanders round his local Cornish beach, contemplating the turns his life has taken. His wife Daphne struggles hopelessly with the latest fish recipe, trying to keep something in her life under control. Two of their children are keeping it all together – just. But they are all still recovering from the shock of the prodigal daughter, Juliet, being imprisoned in New York State for her part in an art theft. Since then, Charles appears to have lost his entire family. Now Juliet is being released, the family is about to be reunited and the wounds her imprisonment has caused are being re-opened.

Previews available in: English

Showing 7 featured editions. View all 7 editions?

Add another edition?

Book Details

Published in, edition notes, the physical object, community reviews (0).

• Created September 23, 2008
• 3 revisions

Wikipedia citation

Copy and paste this code into your Wikipedia page. Need help ?

• Become a Writer
• Download App
• English English
• ภาษาไทย Thai
• Bahasa Indonesiac Indonesian
• Movie and Book Reviews by Dreame
• Billionaire Romance

Must Read: The Promise of Happiness Novel Review

First off, let’s introduce the novel… Natalie Nichols’s mother had a twin after getting married a wealthy husband who maltreated her. After she gave birth to her identical twins, she filed for divorce which was settled by her having full custody to one child, while the other remained with her husband. She took her child and returned to her village which was located far away from the city, and there she raised Natalie Nichols. But Natalie wasn’t always going to be a village champion, and nobody knows tomorrow.

Check out The Prophesied Triplets

• Part 1: Main Characters Of The Promise of Happiness novel
• Part 2: Steamy Captivating Storyline of The Promise of Happiness novel
• Part 3: Steamy Popular Chapters Of The Promise of Happiness novel

Part 4: Conclusions in The Promise of Happiness novel

Part 1: main characters of the promise of happiness novel.

Before we delve into discussing the main storyline of this super-duper novel, let’s see the main characters. While all the characters in this story are important, here are those to look out for…

Natalie Nichols , is the female protagonist of this novel. She was twenty five by the time she returned to her city – Dellmoor. She was tall, pretty and smart.

Yara Nichols , is her sister and the main antagonist of the story. She’s an identical twin to Natalie, therefore they share the same age and attributes.

Part 2: Steamy Captivating Storyline of The Promise of Happiness Novel

As earlier stated in the introduction area, Natalie was raised in the village. When she was seventeen, her mother took ill and died. Her grand parents were long dead before her mother returned to her home from the failed marriage. Therefore, her father regained custody of her, but things were different now.

How were things supposed to be the same? This was a child they hadn’t seen since she was a baby, that aside, she was now almost a woman and was meeting her father and family for the first time. She was only taken into the family because she was a biological relative. But all affection, acceptance and kindness had been done away with.

Therefore, in her home Natalie was still a stranger. The person who hated her the most was her twin, identical sister. To her, this girl from the village had come to share everything that took her years to acquire. She was going to be rolling in the same society, eat what she eat, and what not. It didn’t help that she looked exactly like her, which meant that her fan base full of boys was going to be divided.

Yara had to do something. Being mean to Natalie wasn’t enough, especially now that they’d turned eighteen and their father was already arranging a billionaire marriage for Natalie. He wasn’t doing it to Favour her, yes, after all the billionaire in question was an old man. But Natalie cannot bear to see Natalie enjoy anything nice in her city. Therefore, she plotted, hired a low life to sleep with her sister and ruin the marriage arrangement.

But something changed… in the morning after the act had been completed as she hoped, Yara took her father and they busted into the room where Natalie had forcefully lost her innocence in the hands of a stranger. They scolded her and dragged her out after injuring her on the face. Later, when Yara returned to the hotel room to cover evidence of foul play… she saw in horror that it wasn’t her hireling who’d done the job, but the wealthiest man Dellmoor.

Plan A, became Plan B, and Yara determined to take Natalie’s place in the Billionaire’s life. She pretentiously took care of Natalie until she gave birth, she took the twins and set the room on fire. But Natalie escaped through the window and the jump brought out the last baby. She did not have twins, but triplet. She went into hiding, while Yara became the baby mama to the billionaire Samuel Bowers.

Now five years have passed and Natalie is returning to Dell moor with a face covered with a hyper realistic mask. Yara had tried to cover her tracks by murdering her and taking her place, but Natalie had survived. She was back to settle scores… at the airport, she met a little girl who couldn’t speak because of a disease, but this girl spoke for the first time, addressing her as mama.

What would it be for Yara Nichols who didn’t know that her sister is still alive? How about the two other kids from Natalie’s birth? And what about Samuel Bowers? Let’s see what we find in the hot chapters below…

Part 3: Steamy Popular Chapters Of The Promise of Happiness Novel

The promise of happiness novel chapter 15: leaving without the mask.

As earlier, Natalie was back to Dellmoor, she had found a new profession over the space of five years that she’d been away. She was a doctor who cured impossible diseases. But she became a corona who masks her face in Dellmoor.

Now Yara had found out in shock that she wasn’t only alive, but a prominent person in Dellmoor. When her kids described this person with the name, Yara was relieved cos that didn’t sound like Natalie. Natalie was visiting the house that day and Yara wasn’t a good sight to see.

The Promise of Happiness Novel Chapter 16: you are stalking me

Natalie and Samuel Bowers still didn’t know yet that they were the biological parents of the kids. Samuel had married Yara thinking she was the mother to his children. But after his daughter spoke for the first time when she saw Natalie, he started searching for this woman and found her. He saw her as a cure for his daughter’s illness.

Now Natalie was in his house to check on the kids. And had seen Yara but didn’t know Samuel also lived there. Yara still hadn’t seen her through face, but one thing led to the other and Samuel would unmask Natalie and open the pandora’s box full of worms.

Permit me to heave a sigh of relief… that’s how much tension you get from reading the promise of happiness novel. The cliffhangers are superb and placed at the right places. There are lessons… do not kill your brother. God asked Abel, “where is your brother?” We all know the answer. The punishment for murder is usually death, not all lawyers can change it. Let’s be our brothers keepers. Again, envy, jealousy any covetousness are sins that lead to the kind of hell Yara went to.

LEAVE A REPLY Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Free reading for new users

The Promise of Happiness

By Sara Ahmed

BUY THE BOOK

Not yet rated

Community Reviews

See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.

More books by this author

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Politics & Social Sciences

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

• Highlight, take notes, and search in the book
• In this edition, page numbers are just like the physical edition

Buy for others

Buying and sending ebooks to others.

• Select quantity
• Buy and send eBooks
• Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

The Promise of Happiness Kindle Edition

Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway , The Well of Loneliness , Bend It Like Beckham , and Children of Men , Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

• ISBN-13 978-0822347255
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Duke University Press Books
• Publication date April 6, 2010
• Language English
• File size 1322 KB
• See all details
• Kindle (5th Generation)
• Kindle Keyboard
• Kindle (2nd Generation)
• Kindle (1st Generation)
• Kindle Paperwhite
• Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation)
• Kindle Touch
• Kindle Voyage
• Kindle Oasis
• Kindle Scribe (1st Generation)
• Kindle Fire HDX 8.9''
• Kindle Fire HDX
• Kindle Fire HD (3rd Generation)
• Fire HDX 8.9 Tablet
• Fire HD 7 Tablet
• Fire HD 6 Tablet
• Kindle Fire HD 8.9"
• Kindle Fire HD(1st Generation)
• Kindle Fire(2nd Generation)
• Kindle Fire(1st Generation)
• Kindle for Windows 8
• Kindle for Windows Phone
• Kindle for BlackBerry
• Kindle for Android Phones
• Kindle for Android Tablets
• Kindle for iPhone
• Kindle for iPod Touch
• Kindle for iPad
• Kindle for Mac
• Kindle for PC
• Kindle Cloud Reader

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

From the back cover, about the author.

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others , also published by Duke University Press; The Cultural Politics of Emotion ; Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality ; and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism .

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The promise of happiness, duke university press, chapter one.

Excerpted from The Promise of Happiness by SARA AHMED Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00EZBTWRC
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Duke University Press Books (April 6, 2010)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 6, 2010
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1322 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 328 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0822347253
• #71 in Phenomenology
• #183 in Gay Studies
• #317 in Phenomenological Philosophy

About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..