Lennon, J. Robert. "Happyland: A Novel." Harper's. Jul., Aug. 2006: var.

I'm cheating, here, in that technically I haven't Finished! this text, because it's still being published, serially, in the coming months. I just wanted to call it to folks' attentions, so that they can find issues and pick it up. It's very good, and yet very plain and straightforward, in that the story is something we've all seen a dozen times before—a stranger comes to a small town and everything starts changing—but there's something incredibly thrilling about reading a novel in monthly chunks. Isn't it like so weird that this is how people used to do it all the time? Like Dickens' readers and all them?

I first came across Lennon in McSweeney's issue 5, with his piece called "The Accursed Items", which is a kind of list piece of a bunch of well detailed objects that have bad mojo atached to them for whatever reasons. It's a piece full of spooky mystery and wonder. The exact kind of thing I like to do, or would like to do:

SHOULDER PADS her mother tore from an otherwise stylish dress, recovered from the garbage and employed to fill out her training bra while she dances to pop music in front of the mirror

TRIPLE-WASHED MIXED GREENS in a plastic bag, on a shelf with others like it

THE TEST RESULTS from the genetics lab that his hands are shaking too hard to open (194-5)

(Those page numbers are in reference to the McSwy's issue and not to the Harper's issues, of course.)

At any rate, I offer you these as a way to entice you, and then to give you a brief precis of the novel so far, in which a woman named Happy Masters has overcome a very abusive girlhood to become the head of a huge multinational corporation that makes dolls packaged with historical novels telling their own stories. Happy arrives one day in a small town in upstate New York and begins to take over, buying everything and turning this tiny world upside down.

The novel puts my liberal and conservative sides at war within my tired little mind. Hooray for her initiative to give girls jobs and business opportunities! Boo to her for tearing down old, storied landmarks just because she has the money to! Is she a hero or not? Is she literature or is she theatre?

Basically I want someone to talk about the book with. Read quickly and comment, like, say right here, just at the end of this.