Rating: 79% | C+ | ★★★☆☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time. In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill. Spoiler-Free Review: Happy Hour is perhaps best described as a lot of incisive quotes strung together with minimal plot. Needless to say, I liked it. Granados's writing brims with sardonic verve; the story proceeds in an almost–stream-of-consciousness journey through dive bars, sublet apartments, and dizzying high rises. Isa and Gala strike at each other, then at everyone around them, in the midst of a sweltering, heat-vibrating New York summer that brings out the desperation and determined carpe diem in everyone. I received Happy Hour as a gift from McNally Jackson during their winter holiday giveaway last year, but I'm happy I waited (procrastinated) reading it until the season was right. Only in the thick of it, with sweat dripping into your eyes on the subway, can you understand the simultaneous itch to run screaming into the street and the desire to sink down into yourself. The fast-and-loose nature of the plot allows Granados to dig into Isa's thoughts and especially into Isa's observations of the city; I have sticky tabs on just about every other page. Happy Hour is a novel that will only improve upon successive re-reads. There's so much to pick apart about the characters' chemistry and about the way Isa thinks. I could live in Granados's mind forever. Or, more accurately, she seemed to live in mine while I read, rifling through my memories and private thoughts. I realize now, the older you get, the harder it is to be impressed because people make you feel ashamed of ever being impressed by anything at all. I kept many glowing remarks to myself because of this.
But, of course, a plot-less novel has its limits, and as the novel meets its second and third acts, the pacing slows dramatically. It becomes less clear what kind of ending Happy Hour will have, and more crucially, if any ending will be satisfying. But Granados's writing is so irresistible, and the city so spectacular, that to DNF would be a travesty.
Autumn has set in once again in New York, but for readers who want to recall the heat, the sound of vendors on the street, and the masses of people dancing under neon lights, Happy Hour gives everything its title promises.
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From the ArchiveWhile my main reviews are organized by seasons and I try to write reviews immediately after I finish reading, there are always stories that lose to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From the Archive is a redemptive collection of mini-reviews of books I read in the past that continue to captivate me.
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