The Pursuit of Happiness - Douglas Kennedy

The Pursuit of Happiness is a character driven drama which revolves around the relationships of its main characters and how little chance happenings can change the courses of everyone lives. Whilst at its heart is the love story of the love of the main character's life, it reads almost like an autobiography of her life, with the love story obviously being a large part of that. The story is that of Sara Smythe, who has a chance meeting with Jack Malone, whilst at a party at her brother; Eric's house. That one chance meeting sets about changing their lives, and subsequently many other's people's lives around them, in ways they would have never expected. ...  Read the complete review

Douglas Kennedy has been going downhill ever since his outrageous debut The Dead Heart. I found The Pursuit of Happiness to be utterly irritating from the first word. Why a man born in the 1950s would create as his main character a young woman in post-war New York is sinmply baffling. Is the comtemporary world so bereft of content that a young man in the bloom of his talent should pick the tired old boho New York novel as worthy of his attention? Sara Smythe is one of the most irritating and superficial characters I have encountered in a long time. Fleeing her uptight Conneticut WASP background (who doesn't in American fiction) she embraces Manhattan in all its ...  Read the complete review

Apparently the American born but London residing author, Douglas Kennedy is a well known and a critically acclaimed author, well you could have fooled me. I had never heard of the chap. Well not until (almost a year again now) I accidentally forgot to send back one of those book club returns and so was lumbered with the novel The Pursuit of Happiness by the aforementioned Kennedy. It was a lucky lumbering as the book evoked memories of Sebastian Faulks' beautiful way of conveying a narrative and in particular the book On Green Dolphin Street. However, The Pursuit of Happiness surpassed On Green Dolphin Street, it absorbed me, I wanted to find out what happened to ...  Read the complete review