57 pages • 1 hour read
Angie KimA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Reviewers have described Happiness Falls as a literary thriller, literary mystery, and philosophical drama, highlighting its generic blending of mystery plot elements with literary subject matter and thematic resonances. Mysteries tend to focus on an event, usually a crime, and follow the efforts of an investigator to determine what happened and who is responsible. By contrast, thrillers usually focus on a crime that haven’t occurred yet, organized around a ticking clock countdown as an investigator races to prevent the crime. While the novel opens with the unsolved mystery of Adam’s disappearance, it also includes the racing against time element of Eugene’s secure placement order—the family needs to solve what happened to Adam to prevent Eugene from being locked up. However, unlike traditional mysteries, in which all loose ends are typically explained by the end, this novel subverts the genre by leaving ambiguities unresolved. Adam’s whereabouts are not completely clarified, and readers are left with questions about whether the family has fabricated evidence to free Eugene.
The novel’s tone and themes also stray outside the bounds of typical thrillers; its philosophical and psychological considerations are features of literary fiction. Angie Kim situates the novel in the context of the real world, exploring how events like the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, policing after the murder of George Floyd, anti-Asian racism, and the immigrant experience affect the novel’s characters. Mia’s focus on “high-brow” philosophical concepts like heuristics and Noam Chomsky’s linguistic nativism also elevates the novel’s take on the missing-person narrative structure.
In the early 20th century, Korean immigrants came to the United States to work on Hawaiian plantations until the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924, which severely limited all immigration from Asia; another influx happened after the Korean War, when the War Bride Act of 1946 allowed for the immigration of Korean spouses of US servicemen. However, most of the two million Korean Americans in the US today come from families that immigrated after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. For many second-generation Korean Americans, experiences of racism include bias about not being “American enough,” stereotypes about linguistic fluency, and the pervasive demand that the question, “Where are you from?” not be answered with a US location.
More recently, COVID-19 prompted a new form of anti-Asian racism, in which an entire racial/ethnic group was blamed for the pandemic because the disease was first observed in China. Media coverage of the pandemic, xenophobic statements by political leaders, and use of social media platforms has contributed to the spread of this version of anti-Asian bias. Anti-Asian acts of discrimination and violence have increased an estimated 300% following the pandemic, with as many as one in five Americans of Asian descent reporting experiencing this type of bigotry (Wong-Padoongpatt, Gloria, et al. “The Slow Violence of Racism on Asian Americans During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 10, 2022).
The novel highlights these features of the Korean American experience, as the Parkson family navigates bias and explores how family connections change between generations born in different countries.