![]() The Illicit Happiness is fun, despite all the unhappiness that riddles the novel, and Joseph avoids the curse of the second novel with panache. There is none of the acidic contempt or curious politics that crippled Joseph’s first novel, Serious Men. Set in 1990, in a lane that has four residential buildings named A, B, C and D, starring a family that is peculiar despite efforts to be normal, The Illicit Happiness is a witty, unforgiving but deeply affectionate look at life in pre-liberalised India. For the next three years, Unni becomes Ousep’s study and the father’s project of unconquerable Will is to figure out why Unni did that Terrible Thing. ![]() ![]() Unni is the last person anyone expects would go the Humpty Dumpty way, but one day, inexplicably, he does. A gifted cartoonist, he’s the one person in the novel who isn’t burdened by the mania for academic excellence. It seems there is nothing he can’t handle, from his classmates to his mother’s delusions, his father’s drunken antics to his brother’s anxieties. ![]() Unni, the elder, is the one whom everyone loves. His wife, Mariamma, has a postgraduate degree in economics, nurses fantasies about killing her husband, and regularly talks to the walls. Ousep is a journalist by day and neighbourhood menace by night. ![]()
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