There Is Happiness

There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories

By Brad Watson

W.W. Norton & Company, 2024

Hardcover: $29.99; eBook: $20.99

Genre: Short Stories

Reviewed by Edward Journey

The astonishing fiction of Brad Watson is available in a new collection, There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories. For readers familiar with Watson’s work, the collection includes eight favorite stories published in two previous short story collections – Last Days of the Dog-Men (1996) and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010) – and ten new stories. 

In addition to his short story collections, Watson, who was born in Meridian, Mississippi, wrote two novels, The Heaven of Mercury (2002) and Miss Jane (2016), which further illustrate the brilliant and thrilling expanse of his imagination. After receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Alabama, Brad Watson taught creative writing at various institutions including the University of Alabama, Harvard, and the University of Wyoming. It was recently announced that Watson, who died in 2020, will be inducted into the 2025 class of the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame.

Readers new to Watson’s oeuvre will be stunned by the range, humanity, and oddities of There Is Happiness. They will find a writer in full command of his skills and unique vision. And there are plenty of those sublime and heart-breaking dogs; no writer captures the generous and faithful canine personality as generously and faithfully as Brad Watson. Readers who have followed his creative evolution as each new novel or collection appeared will appreciate this opportunity to revisit and to see what came later. There is no contemporary fiction writer whose new work I anticipated more than Watson’s.

“Dying for Dolly,” the first story in the new collection, starts and ends in prison and never escapes the confines of Alabama. Even so, I was left with the sense of an epic range in a straightforward story of a man who begins his personal rehabilitation by performing onstage with Dolly Parton but is drawn irresistibly back to an out-of-control and manipulating woman (despite Dolly’s earnest warning that “That girl’s got problems”). The final story, “There Is Happiness,” is a fever dream that begins with a horrible car accident with three victims – one dead, one maimed, and one missing – and follows a serial killer who sees marriage and family as “an oppressive, state-sanctioned bondage.”

Watson creates visions of alienation and connection which can turn on a phrase. An escaped leopard lurks in the trees with the “godlike invisibility of observation.” A family, faced with a distraught father, sits “paralyzed by his grief and our white, Southern, Protestant inability to deal with emotions.” A man lounging on his lawn, four months after his wife “died” (she left him, actually), muses that “This is the predatory season for women, when men lie pale and naked in their yards like dazed birds.” A grieving widow cannot believe that her husband’s death “was God’s will, that he had singled out Pops like an assassin.” Three women who bonded over miscarriages smoke “self-consciously, like people in the movies” and watch a girl dance gracefully, “like those big girls who were always so good at modern dance in high school.” An ex-husband ponders how a once-dazzling couple devolved into two people “trying like craven saints to feel nothing.” 

The longest story in the book, “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” is the hallucinatory examination of a young married couple, manipulated by aliens in human form, and pulled into a mystifying world of unforeseen wonders and dreams unrequited. Watson finds the humor and humanity in stories of lonely, trapped, and desperate people who are longing, occasionally resilient, or have “realized that they were negligible.”

The dog stories stand out for the ways in which the canine perspective puts human foibles in sharp focus. It is hard to stress enough how wonderful these dogs are as seen through Watson’s sharp eyes. A seeing eye dog waits patiently at a broken traffic light, intently using all of his senses to protect his human charge. A sweet and nervous dog experiences grief and anxiety as she watches her constantly bickering couple break apart. A widow and her beloved, dying dog share an elaborate last meal and a barking dog gets lost in his barking, losing track of why he was barking to begin with.

Two stories “in progress” are a reminder that this collection is posthumous. Toward the end of “The Zookeeper and the Leopard,” a “Watson note to self” is included in which the author notes how this section of the novel will be expanded in revision. It is an honor for the reader to be privy to that small hint of the writer’s process and vision. “Crazy Horse,” another story in progress, seems complete as is.  

The stories of There Is Happiness capture lives that are drowning in the everyday, striving to transcend the morass. With that first collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men, Watson set a prodigious standard with a vision that was unique and true. He continued to meet and surpass that standard in the works that followed. There Is Happiness is an enduring record of a fearless writer whose work should be treasured.  

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).