Review: The Underside of Joy

Seré Prince Halverson's debut novel is a faultless exploration of sadness and shame, anger and forgiveness; a story well told about people we would like to know.

Ella Beene left an unhappy, childless marriage in San Diego and migrated up the coast to Northern California, where she met Joe Capozzi. His wife, Paige, had walked out on him four months earlier, leaving him with a three-year-old daughter and a four-month-old son. Feeling needy and bereft is not what brings them together, however: they fall in love. Annie and Zach, Joe's children, immediately become Ella's. This is the family she was longing for and couldn't have before, and all is well for several years.

Joe's dreams of being a photojournalist ended when it became necessary for him to take over the family grocery store, started by his grandpa, proudly carried on by his father and now by him. He still loves to take pictures and one early morning he sets out for the beach to do just that. This time, he doesn't come back. A rogue wave catches him and pulls him under.

Ella and Joe had been married for three years and she thought she knew everything she needs to know about him. She "lived much of my life according to that one lesson: Look the other way. Don't ask. Ever. And good God, don't say what you really think." But Joe took secrets with him; secrets that will not stay buried. The store is in huge financial trouble and Ella doesn't know the whole truth about why Paige left.

When Paige shows up at Joe's funeral and makes it clear that she wishes to reclaim her children, Ella is devastated. Paige had suffered from postpartum depression and, fearing that she would harm the children, left to seek help; at the time, she said she was never coming back. Post-therapy, however, she knows more about herself and where the psychosis originated. She also insists that she sent many, many letters to Joe and the children--letters that Ella never saw.

Ella and Paige enter into a custody hearing that takes unexpected turns. The truth about Paige and what happens between these two women brings an eminently satisfying conclusion to the novel. In coming to an understanding of the past--Joe's, his family's, Paige's and her own--Ella says: "I know now that the most genuine happiness is kept afloat by an underlying sorrow. We all break the surface into this life already howling the cries of our ancestors, bearing their DNA, their eye colors and their scars, their glory and their shame. It is theirs; it is ours. It is the underside of joy." --Valerie Ryan

Shelf Talker: When a man drowns, a custody battle ensues between the children's mother and the woman who married him. Secrets must be discovered and understood to bring solace to all concerned.

 

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