Sally Farber has everything a 40-year-old New Yorker could want: a loving doctor husband; two healthy, adorable daughters; great friends; and a charming book editor who used to be her lover and still calls her Cookie. Sally's fourth book is The History of Happiness
, and there's the rub. The deeper she digs, the more elusive a definition of happiness becomes (is contentment just "resignation wearing a funny hat?"), and the more bedeviled she is by the guilty certainty that she isn't as happy as she should be. The great charm of Grunwald's sweet, comic novel is that it's two books: the one Sally's writing and the one about her. So why doesn't it feel more substantial? Certainly Sally's ironic enough, so you can't knock her for starving amid plenty. But there's something perfunctory about her affair with a famous artist when her girls go to sleep-away camp. Although she deems it a self-destructive act akin to cutting herself after her father's death when she was 19, the reader never doubts the affair will end without scars, and she will rediscover that happiness is a warm husband. Grunwald is smart, funny and talented enough for a reader to want one thing more—the unexpected. Agent, Liz Darhansoff. (June)
