Meditations on Happiness

By the Lake by John McGahern

Happy Friday, dear reader! I’m back again, with another edition of Eve’s Extra Thoughts and Ramblings on the Something We Read (The Podcast)™ Book of the Month. I’m still workshopping a name for this feature, which will recur monthly from now on. The Footnotes (obvious), the Appendix (medical), Side Order, or Dessert? Coda, Postlude, Excursus (just discovered in the thesaurus), Cherry on Top? I’m not sold on any of the above, to be frank, and come to think of it, why does it always come back to food with me? I’m writing about books…

No matter—nomenclature is not really important right now, and I’m sure I’ll stumble upon something, or alternately back my way into it, eventually. Right now, what’s important is By the Lake by John McGahern. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to go listen to the most recent episode (episode two) of my podcast (I started a podcast with my sister!!!). The pod, as mentioned above, is called Something We Read™, and this month we (my sister, Kathryn and I) read By the Lake.

You can listen to us talk about it here on Spotify

And here on Apple Podcasts

Please also subscribe, follow, download, rate, review & share. If you like it, obviously. Which I hope you do. I literally hate peddling my own wares as it were (a topic (or perhaps lament) for another day), but I’m doin’ my best out here.

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Huzzah! Now on to my extra special good and written-instead-of-spoken thoughts:

There are, in fact, so many special things about this book, I could jump off from just about anywhere and swim through tranquil waters. BUT, I will try to start from a logical point, which is a brief summary of the ‘plot,’ though as we highlight in the pod, there really isn’t much of one…

Joe and Kate Ruttledge have settled by the lake, on the outskirts of an unnamed country town on the border of Northern Ireland, leaving London life behind them. They now live in keeping with the rhythms of the land—the cows are born, the lambs are born, the hay is made. The lambs go to market and then the calves. Joe and Kate walk around the lake to sit and have a little whiskey or a little tea with Jamsie and Mary Murphy. Otherwise, Jamsie and Mary come to them. This is life, and McGahern invites you to be carried along by it.

The book is filled with small anecdotes, which amongst this close-knit and quiet community, serve as news. Small dramas play out, met as all of our own small dramas are, with much consternation and consideration. They are granted much importance, given much power to torment, and then peaceably, relievedly sighed away upon their resolution. The earth does continue to turn.

There is a cast of characters, in some ways, archetypal: Gossipy, good-natured Jamsie, always after the news—as previously defined. John Quinn, who would be a womanizer if he had half the charm he thinks he does. What he does have is eleven (if I remember correctly) charming children. Contractor Patrick Ryan with a tripwire temper who leaves jobs unfinished more often than he finishes them. The richest man in town is the Shah, Joe’s uncle. He is a man of custom and reserve—to such an extent that when he decides he’d like to try to sell his company to his long-time right hand man, he enlists Joe Rutteldge to make the offer and see it through instead of doing it himself.

It is these characters and their idiosyncrasies that fill McGahern’s pages. The pieces come together slowly and quietly, yes quietly, to form these funny, charming, special-in-their-lack-of-specialness people. In a few moments here and there, McGahern cuts through his meditative narration of every day activity with an observation that is so clean and to the point that it makes your breath catch.

There’s Kate observing that, “‘Half the pleasure of the wild strawberries is watching the finch,’” instead of sending the cat out to kill the birds. The cat who listeners will know, loves killing.

There’s a bar room scene, in which John Quinn makes the usual fool of himself—“There was talk and laughter as soon as he left the bar, all of it concentrated on his dealings, but no discussion as to why he exercised such a fascination.”

My personal favorite, when Ruttledge and Jamsie weigh the lambs for market:

“‘Salvation,’ Jamsie said when an underweight lamb was marked and let free.
‘A very temporary salvation.’
‘Tell me what other kind there is?’
‘A long life on grass.’
‘You think that’s permanent? They are going where they should be going. To a good Sunday table,” he said.”

These glimpses into the strangeness of being alive—the way that you can love a finch who steals your strawberries, love it just for the sight of it, even when you’re supposed to want it dead. Or the way that people talk of others without a moment of self-reflection. The way that’s not a bad thing or a good thing, but just a thing that’s true. Or coming face to face with death and living to tell the tale, for now. Knowing that it’s always only for now.

And of course, there’s the passage that Kathryn read to us on the podcast in which Ruttledge finds himself feeling happy, only to catch himself—stop himself: “The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; if should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.”

I was struck by this when I read it and then again when Kathryn read it—I like this sentiment, so Irish seeming, superstitious, defensive, humble. I like this sentiment so much, in fact, that when I first read it, then heard it again I thought that maybe it was the way I felt. Like the idea was plucked from my brain. But it’s not the way I feel and it wasn’t plucked from my brain—at least not beyond the idea that happiness can’t be forced or even coerced.

You see, I feel certain that if I were dropped down into the world of this book, I would knock it all sideways. I am an ecstatic. I can be a quiet admirer, but I prefer to lose my mind whenever possible. The calves would be born and I would cry out to God, the neighbors would come over for whiskey, and I would tell them I loved them. They wouldn’t have any idea what to do with me.

So I’ve been reflecting on how I can fit this quiet approach to happiness that is so appealing to me in with my own personal philosophy on happiness that is louder and more grabby (in a charming way like a baby).

Years ago, when I was in college, during what I reflect on as one of the happiest periods of my admittedly short life, I told my dear Uncle Robert—frequent receiver of thoroughly distressed phone calls from the high school version of me—that I was so happy I couldn’t believe I had ever been sad. And you know what he did? He turned to me with one corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk and said, it will get so much worse.

At the time, I was outraged. I think I even asked him what the fuck was wrong with him and slammed the car door on my way out. My parade! And he rains!?? I’ve told him this story before and he didn’t remember it, but I’ve never forgotten it. He was right, of course. It did get much worse. But then much better again, so much better. And so now when I see springtime flowers, or sit around the table with people I love, or see the sunset reflected the west facing windows that I can see out of my east facing windows, or any of it, there’s a little voice in the back of my head that laughingly says, it will get so much worse.

There is a danger inherent in happiness, but where Ruttledge doesn’t want the danger to know that he knows its there, I take my comfort from looking it straight in the eye, making a friend of it, forcing it to dance with me, for now at least.

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We chose By the Lake before doing any research into where our dear listeners (/readers as the case may be) might be able to purchase said book. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be available in abundance…but I have found a few places you can buy it. If you see That They May Face the Rising Sun for sale anywhere, it’s the same book, published under that (far superior?) title in Ireland. It was also apparently made into a movie in 2023—has anyone seen it? Okay byeee! xx

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