Review: Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

SPOILER ALERT: I openly spoil major plot points for Happiness Falls by Angie Kim.

TL; DR: An intriguing mystery, Happiness Falls by Angie Kim becomes a study in communication, an examination of the way we treat those defined as neurodivergent, and a slightly tedious meander into an examination of happiness itself. 

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim was the first of my recent mystery reads to be a pre-order. Upon hearing the premise on The New York Times Book Review Podcast—a fourteen-year-old boy diagnosed with autism and Angelman syndrome returns home without his (now, presumably missing) father after their daily walk—I was intrigued, excitedly anticipating what family dramas I’d discover once the book finally populated itself behind its colorful cover in my Kindle Library. 

Set during the Summer of 2020 when life went topsy-turvy, Happiness Falls is told from the POV of Mia Parksons, a half-Korean, half-white college student I feel comfortable describing as pretty damn annoying. She doesn’t love, well, much of anything and seems to continually dismiss her family’s feelings in favor of justifying her own actions by way of over-analysis. In her New York Times review, Jennifer Reese refers to Mia as “prolix.” What (just barely) saves Mia from being a down-right labor is that she seems to have enough introspection to at least be aware of the fact that she’s a jerk. Anyway, her father Adam (whom I’ve mentally cast as Adam Scott) and her aforementioned brother Eugene go for daily, morning walks. On the morning of June 23, 2020, Mia sees Eugene sprinting “beautifully” toward the house. Overcome with joy by the sight of her active, autistic brother, she runs down stairs to embrace him, but he, bloody and extremely agitated, knocks her to the ground.  Instead of attempting to ascertain what distress has befallen her stricken brother, she naturally chooses to take a nap on the grass. While supine, her eyes closed, she hears someone run past her down the driveway and enter the back door of her home. I assumed this was going to be the root of some kind of plot twist (maybe it wasn’t the Amazon delivery person!) but I was mistaken; ‘twas just a package being delivered. Well, when Mia finally rises from the front lawn, she ignores the fact that her younger brother semi-assaulted her, goes up stairs (where he is jumping up and down on his trampoline) and gets on with her day of continual pouting. The sources of her current ennui are the dissolving of her relationship with her now-ex boyfriend Vic (which happened via phone right before Eugene returned home fatherless) and the argument she and her mother had the night before. Slowly but surely, her twin brother John and her mother Hannah, who has a PhD in Linguistics, realize that Adam is in fact missing. Mia assumes nothing is wrong, even telling her brother he can’t call the police because it’s too soon. Of course, though, she eventually realizes that something is very much indeed wrong and an official search is commenced, led by a Detective Janus who is competent to the point of annoying Mia. 

It’s clear from the offset that the key to the mystery of Adam’s disappearance is in Eugene’s mind. The conundrum is that since he’s nonspeaking, Eugene becomes a blank space for the better part of the book. These rest of the numerous characters, each with their own attempts at communication, dance around Eugene, the truth always right beside them but invisible. In this, I think there’s a beautiful message of how we ignore those we’ve categorized as not “normal.” Even Adam gets a voice in absentia through his recovered notebook, which contains his informal studies and observations on the nature of happiness, interpreted through Mia as she receives pages of her father’s recovered notebook via the police. Like most mysteries, the plot is a series of revelations that lead the characters and reader closer to the truth. What makes Happiness Falls interesting is how different reveals happen to different characters, each with their own specific communication issues: Hannah is hindered by her accent. John has an image to maintain. Adam is missing. Eugene literally can’t. Even the lawyer and Detective Janus are hindered by their own professional jargon and legal interests. Expectedly, since the book is written in Mia’s POV, we are most acquainted with her voice, which is complicated by the presence of her judgments towards everything, especially people. Because of this, our perceptions of events and characters are constantly informed and colored by her misgivings, regrets, and second-guessing. This extends to how she distributes the clues she gathers within the story; we might learn something at the same time Mia does, but she may decide to keep the information to herself or only tell her brother. This makes sense considering that she hasn’t told her family that she’s going to be leaving college a year early or that she was even in a relationship with the aforementioned Vic. That said, each of the characters has their own justifications for not sharing pertinent information with each other: not wanting to be cruel, not wanting to raise suspicion, or not wanting to give someone psychological ammunition. 

This is clearly learned behavior because we soon learn that Adam is the most secretive of them all, not only did he not share with his family that he had been working with a new professional to help Eugene discover a usable mode of communication, he didn’t even tell his wife that he’d been diagnosed with cancer. These kinds of omissions are what keep me from completely buying his good-guy image. In fact, his secrets are what kinda get him killed. Eugene, once the family discovers the work he’s been doing with one Anjeli Rapari to become more communicative, is finally able to express what really happened to his father: while on their walk, Adam told Eugene that they were going to postpone surprising the rest of the family with news of him being able to communicate. This infuriates Eugene, specifically because he’s spent the last fourteen years of his life being treated as a “bah-bo,”  the Korean word for idiot. They have an altercation which is witnessed by several passersby who not only start hurling epithets at Eugene, but one Karen in particular pepper sprays them. They are able to deal with the situation, but later on, as they’re picnicking up by a broken rock above the waterfall, the boys who bullied them earlier reappear, throwing Adam’s backpack over the cliff. In an attempt to catch the backpack, Eugene loses his footing, and Adam swoops in to protect him. Eugene, his eyes closed, lands with a thud on the dirt, only to reopen his eyes and realize his father has tripped and gone over the cliff. I suspected about halfway through that this was what had happened. What makes this reveal intriguing, however, is how the story Eugene relates to his lawyer and the law is almost identical to the theoretical story Mia, her twin Jon, and her maybe-ex Vic discussed the night before while Eugene was sleeping on Mia’s lap. The question of whether not Eugene made up this story to protect himself, conveniently overhearing his sister’s conversation the night before, hangs in the air with delicious wonder. 

While I’ve written a tad disparagingly of Mia’s character, I think it’s important to note that this book was a delight to read. The only thing that made it less of a delight than it could have been were the pages, and often footnotes, Mia as narrator uses to muse upon the nature of happiness based on her father’s findings and philosophizing. These musings become a tad tedious towards the end, taking up more space than the resolution of the mystery itself, which felt like a strange choice, narratively. Once I learned what happened to Adam Parson, I didn’t then need two more charts mapping out the plausibility of her younger brother’s story informed by her father’s semi-scientific observations. Still, watching this family finally open up to each other, finally learn the truths they’ve been keeping each other was fascinating. Beyond the question of what happened to Adam Parsons, as the story progressed, I kept writing in my notebook, “Why don’t we share what we need to with the people we love the most?”

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