Introduction

If you’d told me in 2003 that this novel wouldn’t be read in its entirety for the first time until 2013, I would probably have stopped writing it—and if you’d told me why, I might have sought out, at least for a while, a less heartbreaking profession than novel writing. Happyland was written, rewritten, abandoned, and resumed at least ten times. It has been bought, edited, cancelled, unbought, rebought, and re-edited. People have offered money for it, then abruptly rescinded their offers; editors have expressed their affection for it one day, then refused to answer their phones the next. Lawyers have conference-called one another about it, sometimes with me listening in—at one point, one told me that “all you have to do” was to move the story to Massachusetts and make it be about, not a doll company, but a chocolate company. “Everyone loves chocolate!” she helpfully elaborated. Needless to say, I declined. When the book finally found its intermediate form, as a somewhat truncated serial published in Harper’s in 2006, more drama ensued, including a parade and many vexing phone calls.

I didn’t mean to write anything remotely controversial. A former doll and children’s book mogul started buying up property in a small town, and the town got mad. Wouldn’t this make a good novel? people kept asking me. You should write it, people kept telling me. I had to admit, I liked the idea—but I would do it my own way. I asked my friends from the town not to tell me anything more about the situation. I would make up my own doll mogul. Indeed, to this day, I still know nothing about the real one that I didn’t learn over the phone, from lawyers. Happy is my own creation, and so is everybody else in this book. But there’s nothing like the appearance of making fun of rich people to bring out the cowardice in others. My original publisher, fearing imaginary, unthreatened lawsuits, pulled the book in the eleventh hour and refused to pay me for the work I’d spent nine months doing under their editorial direction. My British publisher, catching wind of the non-situation, dropped the book as well. As for the mogul everyone was afraid of, her attitude was clear. Did she intend to sue? “Oh, absolutely not,” she told the New York Times, through a spokesperson, “he said it’s all fictional.”

The mogul was right, and still is. If you happen to be familiar with the real town, you will doubtless recognize certain similarities: an inn, a women’s college, a market, an Indian massacre. But rest assured, nobody in this book is supposed to be you, or anyone you know. That twitch at the corner of somebody’s mouth is not yours. That harelip is not your cousin-in-law’s. That goiter isn’t your great-uncle’s. It’s fiction—just ask the ex-doll-mogul.

For a long time, I couldn’t stand the sight of this damned thing. But now I like it—I think it might be a lot of fun. It is, at times, rather nasty, in keeping with its real inspiration, the 2004-era Bush administration that I reviled, and that distracted me from everything in my life that I loved. (Read Mayor Archie, for instance, as Colin Powell.) Going through it one more time for this 2013 Dzanc edition, I was tempted to update a few of its mustier elements. But no, it’s already a period piece, an artifact from the era of videotape, cell phones with buttons on them, and the imprisonment of Martha Stewart. Let it stay there.

I want to thank Dan Wickett from Dzanc for giving the unabridged edition an audience at last, and Roger Hodge and Lewis Lapham, formerly of Harper’s, for their fearlessness and editorial acumen back in 2006. And you, of course, for reading now. Readers have sent me more emails and letters about this unpublished book than about anything else I’ve ever written, and I am delighted to be able to give them this edition at last. Enjoy!

With affection and gratitude,
J. Robert Lennon.