“Happy Days”
Book 1, chapter 12; Book 2, chapter 1
Characters
1.12 a writer (unnamed), the guys on the corner by the candy store (unnamed)
2.1 Maureen, her boss and lover Blackie (aka Pierre), Blackie’s wife Janet, their daughter, Clara.
General Subject/ Plot
1.12: the biography of a writer, who seeks to downplay his privilege and accentuate his independence and wildness.
2.1: Long contemplated, Man finally leaves wife to be with mistress, after altercation involving book of matches and scarf.
Motifs
1.12 Idiom, film/ movies, candy store, Napoleon, guys on the corner, alcohol, writer, John Cusack
2.1 Infidelity, Jesus, Saturday, silk scarf, B. Altman’s (NYC), “Parisian Casino”/ Pierre, coffee,
Notes
The first “Happy Days” strongly corresponds to the second “Movies”, both being stories of a writer’s success.
In the former, the story is the sort that Horatio Alger tale which could occur only in movies; the latter involves a writer distorting the image of himself to make it more marketable — to make it seem more Horatio Alger-like.
He seems to want to make his life something movie-like, something made to appear in the movies.
Like some other chapters, the first “Happy Days” is concerned with its language (“in the parlance of…” “another quaint locution”), its mention of incest suggests the second “Born Again”, its mention of the Times, suggests the Daily News of the first “In the Diner”.
In the second “Happy Days” more of the story of the hat and scarf is filled out: the hat (probably a homburg) indicate the man’s pretension about his worth, which he can’t bear to have insulted or laughed at; the scarf indicates the presence of “another woman.”
Don’t have much of an idea as to why either of these is called Happy Days [Happy Days disambiguation]. What resonates with me most is the TV show by that name, which I recall having featured a Diner — “Al’s” –and a red-head “Ralph the Malph”. Various chapters mention happiness or unhappiness, for instance in the first “In the Bedroom” –“happy as a clam.”
Ad endum, Second Happy Days. — Pierre was such a good sport about everyone calling him Blackie, but why would have minded this? Was he black (another Napoleon type figure)? Was there something else black about him?
–The silk scarf Pierre can’t find strongly suggests the first In the bedroom in which the unnamed cheated on wife has accidentally found her husband’s scarf tucked among her underware (plausible that a silk scarf would be tucked among a woman’s silk or silk like undergarments, and doubly suggestive of offensive the scarf might be to her.
–Related to that, it’s interesting that the discussion, between Pierre and Maureen, about the location of his scarf, comes up as he’s reaching at her underpants (which, however, she’s wearing — which are not in her drawer). It’s these sorts of contrasts (underwear being reach for by a lover, underwear being searched through in a drawer) that I believe Sorrentinno wants to focus on, and not questions like the one raised in the following note, the essence of which is, is a single, coherent narrative told in this book?
–Is the Janet of the second Happy Days the unnamed cheated on wife of the first In The Bedroom? One can neither confirm or deny it. There are discrepancies certainly: in Happy Days (2) the man leaves the woman in In The Bedroom (1) the woman leaves the man. Still, the subjective third person narration always makes us wonder if two characters may have had conflicting interpretations of the same experience.
— Friday night and Saturday morning. For Blackie/ Pierre, the former indicates a moment of finality and decision, the latter, that a mistake may have been made. (We are elsewhere to think of Saturdays as being child visitation days for divorced fathers.)
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