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    Are You Happy Now?: A Novel
    Are You Happy Now?: A Novel
    Are You Happy Now?: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Are You Happy Now?: A Novel

    Written by Richard Babcock

    Narrated by Jeff Cummings

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    John Lincoln is a book editor miserably ensconced at Pistakee, a dinky Chicago publisher. His overwhelming ambition is to flee the bland, over polite Midwest and land in New York—where, he imagines, he’ll work with real writers; brandish success at his skeptical, patrician East Coast parents; and experience again the glories of a city where, with “every block, every step,” he will find something interesting and exciting.

    What he needs is a hot bestseller, and he finds his vehicle in Amy O’Malley, a recent University of Chicago grad who’s worked on the school’s famous sex survey. With Lincoln’s prodding and guidance, Amy writes a sex-filled novel that draws on her experience. Her book indeed opens doors for Lincoln—but not in the way he imagined. Meanwhile, a professor of happiness studies at a local college blackmails him into publishing his fantastically mundane poetry.

    Reminiscent of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Are You Happy Now? is a comic novel about the hard work of understanding what it is you want.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateNov 6, 2012
    ISBN9781469252841
    Are You Happy Now?: A Novel
    Author

    Richard Babcock

    Until stepping down in 2011, Richard Babcock was the longtime editor in chief of Chicago magazine. Before that, he spent more than a decade as a top editor at New York magazine. He is the author of the best-selling Kindle Singles stories “My Wife’s Story” and “Ah, Rat.” Are You Happy Now? is Babcock’s third novel, after Martha Calhoun (1988) and Bow‘s Boy (2002). Raised in Woodstock, Illinois, Babcock graduated from Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan Law School. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Gioia Diliberto, an acclaimed biographer and novelist. He has taught at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Knox College, and Loyola University of Chicago. In addition to writing and teaching, Babcock occupies himself in following the Chicago Cubs, a team he credits for a lifetime’s schooling in the “nuances of failure and loss.”

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    • 5/5
      Something about this book just spoke to me. I settled into the life on John Lincoln almost immediately…seeing the people, places and happenings of his world clearly. (Oddly, I kept picturing him as the character Richard Sherman from “The Seven Year Itch”. A man living through a hot summer in the city, away from his wife, with an active imagination…also a book editor for a small press….)Anyway – Richard Babcock’s writing is so accessible that the reader is just there – in the story. The characters all have distinct voices and all seemed vaguely like people I’ve known. Chicago is a character in the story as well – not as much as New York is in many of the stories that take place there – but still a strong part of the story.I also liked the fact that while Lincoln does make some unwise choices…this never becomes the story of a train wreck happening to a once good life. Stories like that quickly kill off any interest as I find myself wanting to reach into the book and shake sense into people. Lincoln makes mistakes, true, but then realistically deals with the consequences.I’d never heard of Richard Babcock before – but now shall make a point of looking into his previous books.