Virginia author Angie Kim has wrapped a gripping whodunit around a tender examination of the unique challenges facing nonspeaking people and their families in “Happiness Falls.” Starting with a special-needs teenager who witnesses his father’s disappearance during the COVID-19 lockdown and venturing into the struggles the family endures while searching for their dad, Kim’s introspective and educational work of fiction ultimately illuminates the concept of being “nonverbal” as she challenges society’s tendency to associate oral fluency with intelligence.
Kim reveals in the author’s note that as a child she struggled to communicate following her family’s immigration to the U.S. from South Korea. She draws from that youthful frustration, along with extensive research and personal interviews, to craft Eugene Parkson. Eugene is a 14-year-old with the dual diagnosis of autism and Angelman syndrome (AS) — a rare genetic disorder characterized by motor difficulties, “an unusually happy demeanor with frequent smiles and laughter” and speech challenges. He is perceived as a happy child because of his constant grin, despite his high-pitched wailing and inability to convey his thoughts.
The story is told as a recollection beginning 100 days after Adam Parson’s disappearance and narrated by Eugene’s 20-year-old sister, Mia Parkson. Mia is an acerbic and witty college student who has returned with her twin brother, John, to quarantine with their family in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Declaring Mia pretentious, John expresses annoyance by the term “splaughing,” which Mia coins to describe Eugene’s signature sound — a combination of singing and laughing in the pitch of a violin.
Mia is sharply intelligent and refuses to minimize herself to fit in, often to her family’s offense. Her honesty and lack of apology are endearing to observe as she stumbles along the hero’s journey with equal parts self-awareness and self-confidence.
Partially in a quarantine daze, partially self-absorbed and partially distracted by Eugene’s theatrics upon his arrival home from hiking with their dad, Mia fails to realize their father never returns. It takes the family four hours to piece together that Adam is missing. Then Mia drags her feet on reporting his disappearance to the police. This is the first of numerous mistakes that place Eugene under suspicion in his dad’s vanishing.
Kim relays her story in an immersive first-person voice and uses footnotes to provide surprising access into Mia’s character. Her humor and charm effervesce in these David Foster Wallace-style diversions from the main narrative as she digs into abstract theories, the intricacies of Eugene’s conditions or their family history.
At times the footnotes offer complex technical information. Sometimes they’re silly asides, like when Mia ruminates on the difference between how “things sound out loud versus inside your head.” Kim explores a plethora of topics, and the footnotes provide a creative way for Mia to explain the background that supports the author’s narrative conclusions.
Duality is a consistent theme running through “Happiness Falls” as demonstrated by Kim’s abundant use of contrasting elements. It isn’t just Eugene’s dual diagnosis of autism and AS — described as opposing conditions because of their contradictory stereotypes, or Mia and John being fraternal twins who couldn’t be less alike. Mia believes her family is “indubitably, inherently atypical” in every way and focuses on their dualisms to support this claim.
The Parkson children are biracial, their mother Korean and father white. Their parents fulfill nontraditional gender roles: Hannah works outside the home while Adam is a stay-at-home dad. Even their last name Parkson is a blend of their parents’ last names — Park and Parson — and unique to their three children.
More than a title, happiness and how it’s experienced by different members of the family is explored with thematic synergy in “Happiness Falls.” AS is dubbed “the happiness syndrome” and Eugene is considered eternally joyful because of his facial expressions and “splaughing” — But what if he’s not happy?
In Adam’s absence, the family discovers he was working on a secret “happiness quotient” project. As they read through a notebook found in his backpack near the hiking trail, they discover he was developing a formula to measure and manipulate happiness and had been secretly performing experiments on the twins for research. Mia is outraged and spends significant time trying to understand his work, what it means for Eugene and how her father’s theories contrast with her own experience with happiness.
Meanwhile, the mystery of what became of Adam propels the story forward as someone keeps using his ATM card in random locations. Nobody can say why he withdrew $20,000 from his IRA eight months ago. And who is Anjeli Rapari, the woman who left a message on Adam’s voicemail urging him to tell his wife a secret?
As the Parkson family face off with Detective Morgan Janus, who seems more intent on proving Eugene’s guilt than finding Adam, Kim flicks the domino chain reaction on her multifaceted plot. The separate elements come together with impressive cohesion to ask some hard questions as she focuses on her bigger message.
Has the family been incorrect in assuming Eugene is unable to communicate because of cognitive disabilities when the reason may be physical? Is it possible he’s brimming with complex thoughts but is simply unable to communicate them? If so, is there a way to get him to reveal what happened to his father and stop Detective Janus from institutionalizing him?
Angie Kim’s powerhouse of a novel offers a probing exploration of the intersection of communication, speech and intelligence that not only gives voice to a silenced population but concludes with a fantastic twist.
FICTION
“Happiness Falls”
by Angie Kim
Hogarth Books
400 pages, $29
