When is a rom-com not a rom-com? When it's written by Irish novelist Naoise Dolan (Exciting Times). Her word-perfect sophomore effort, The Happy Couple, contains the requisite romance and comedy, but unlike a traditional rom-com, it carries an element of actual suspense as the couple's fate seems not preordained but truly precarious.
The halves of the nominal couple are Celine, a 26-year-old concert pianist who teaches to make ends meet, and Luke, a 28-year-old communications strategist at a tech firm. They share an apartment in Dublin and, as the novel opens, have just gotten engaged. Celine tells Luke that she feels obliged to invite her ex, Maria, to their engagement party; Luke isn't happy about this. Celine insists that Maria won't come, but she does; Luke is less happy. At the party, Luke vanishes and won't answer Celine's texts. Now Celine is unhappy.
The Happy Couple is written with witheringly dry wit and ceaseless innovation (a woman sitting in another's lap is a "woman-woman compound"). Dolan lets key players take turns with the point-of-view reins, among them Celine's sister, who knows that Luke left the party with Maria, and Archie, Luke's best friend and long-ago lover, who carries a torch for the groom-to-be; that Archie has been tapped for best man is beyond inopportune. Love's inconvenience is indeed the novel's preoccupation, alongside love's obverse: loneliness. As the pining Archie concludes with characteristic nitpickiness, loneliness isn't "having no one" but "the gap between what you hoped for and what you got." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer