Happiness Falls

Mia’s twin brother John is presented largely through contrast with Mia, who suggests that he “got the pretty parts—Dad’s round, deep-set moss-brown eyes framed by Mom’s delicate bone structure and dainty nose” (35-36). Caring and optimistic, John works at Henry’s House, Eugene’s therapy center, and is passionate about special education and improving society’s treatment of neurodiverse individuals. In this way, John functions as a foil to Mia, while simultaneously being closely connected to and in sync with her at key points in the novel.

John is so passionate about the field that he wrote his college application essay about why he wants to work in special education. He talks in detail about why society’s treatment of Eugene should be different, and gives his father the article about eye tracking for nonverbal people using alternative modes of communication. Both Eugene and Mia characterize John as overly nice, which Mia grudgingly admits is a positive quality: “[Y]es, John’s hyper-optimism is annoyingly naïve but it’s because he loves you” (271). However, this kindness is not naiveté—the novel strongly suggests that John may have fabricated evidence to exonerate Eugene from being blamed for whatever happened to Adam.

Eugene is Mia and John’s 14-year-old brother who has a dual diagnosis of autism and mosaic Angelman syndrome, which means that he “can’t talk, has motor difficulties, and [...] has an usually happy demeanor with frequent smiles and laughter” (4); he copes with upset through movement and rhythmic “splaugh” noises. Mia describes Eugene as beautiful—a perfect mix of their parents’ features. Unable to communicate prior to his work with therapist Anjeli, Eugene embodies the novel’s theme of Language and Silence; other characters perceive him as trapped in his nonverbal condition.

While Eugene is transformed during the novel by the trauma of his experience, he does not have a clearly defined character arc. However, he is catalyst for the character arcs of other people, especially when his family members are able to communicate with him for the first time. Mia gradually sees that Eugene can probably understand more than she realized, an epiphany that transforms her idea of him: “I see this as a turning point, when my conception of Eugene started to change. He was no longer the baby brother I’d always known, devoid of words, but a stranger capable of reading, comprehending, cogitating—all the things the doctors said he’d never be capable of” (58).

As Eugene speaks via letterboard, Mia is somewhat surprised to learn that, like her, he leans toward cynicism. Later, Anjeli’s observation that “Eugene has a reverence for language” and calls him a “spelling snob” (316) is a significant subversion of other characters’ and society’s longstanding assumptions about his being nonverbal. 

Mia describes her mother Hannah as solution-driven, wanting to “know what happened ASAP” (4), unlike Mia and her father. A PhD in applied linguistics, Hannah is very intelligent and interested in language and culture, having written a “dissertation on the inadequacies of the exiting romanization systems for Korean” (29). As an immigrant, Hannah also has personal experience of specially anti-Asian bias related to language: People underestimate Hannah because she “speaks English like an immigrant—with an accent and a too-perfect syntax that sounds awkwardly geeky, foreign” (29). Mia strongly connects with her mother’s experience of this kind of language-based bias, which is similar to what Mia felt during the family’s sojourn in Korea when she was mocked for not speaking Korean well enough.

Hannah is extremely affectionate toward Eugene, and is described as babying him. She “blames herself for Eugene not talking” (103), and carries extensive guilt due to her inability to communicate with her son, and for their negative experience with physically assisted writing. Hannah’s position as Eugene’s primary caregiver for most of Eugene’s life hits on the novel’s interest in gender dynamics within families that have children with disabilities. While Hannah was simply expected to care for Eugene without praise, when Adam becomes a stay-at-home father, he is universally and publicly lauded in ways that Hannah finds insulting.

While 50-year-old Adam does not appear in the narrative, which opens after his disappearance, he is characterized by the HQ notebooks he left behind. Mia notes that she and her father are similar; like her, was intelligent and curious, enjoyed the “fun little detours” (3) of footnotes, and was immersed in theories about happiness, which focus on the practical application of improving and safeguarding his family’s happiness, indicating his devotion to them. He was also “very into giving toasts, loves using them to get all philosophical and orate about life and family and sometimes the universe” (41), which encapsulates his passion for philosophy and family.

Having quit his job to become Eugene’s primary caregiver four years earlier, Adam was very involved in his children’s lives. He was admired by other parents whose children use Henry’s House therapy resources—mostly because he was the only father in the group; he also wrote Mia long advice letters every year at college drop off.

Adam was devoted to Eugene, taking him on long walks in the park every day, and facilitating his therapy with Anjeli. Nevertheless, Adam was driven by evidence rather than emotion in Eugene’s treatment: He is the one who debunked the facilitated communication therapist, and he also decided to delay revealing Eugene’s ability to communicate until he could obtain proof of it. However, when Adam learned that this was hurting Eugene, he apologized and changed his mind, indicating that he was capable of self-criticism.

Detective Morgan Janus is a secondary character in Happiness Falls, significant largely because of her role in the search for Adam and potential charges against Eugene. With a “six-foot tall figure and super-short, super-red hair” (32), Janus is described as “one of those people who nods the entire time you’re saying something, like a bobblehead doll” (34). Mia relates to her—they share an “obsessive fascination with small changes that have drastic implications” (34). The other personal detail revealed about Detective Janus is that she has recently had an adoption fall through due to the pandemic.

There are several insinuations throughout the novel that Detective Janus has malicious intentions regarding Eugene. Shannon notes that there was an “allegation that she faked an injury, wore a brace to make it all look more serious” (143)—an accusation that echoes what Mia wonders about her own family’s willingness to fake evidence. Later, Mia notes that Detective Janus “seemed to be going out of her way to prove her fairness, the way you might build up credit for something you were planning for later” (338), suggesting nefarious ulterior motives. Janus’s treatment of Eugene—grabbing his arm, putting him in handcuffs, and suggesting his detention—resonates with real-world questions about police abuse of power that came to a head during the protests about the murder of George Floyd in 2020. However, because the reader never learns anything about Detective Janus directly, her true intentions remain ambiguous. 

The “go-to lawyer for Henry’s House families” (122), Shannon Haug has “a veneer of old-fashioned domesticity: a loose, wrinkled skirt suit; her hair a poofy graying blob the shape of a bike helmet; doughy cheeks with dimples; pancake-syrupy smell” (142). While Mia is initially concerned that Shannon is too nice, she quickly proves herself a competent match for Detective Janus, with whom Shannon has numerous verbal altercations. Shannon’s role in the plot is to get the Parksons to prioritize exonerating Eugene, even at the expense of finding out what happened to Adam.

Eugene’s therapist Anjeli Rapari is nicknamed a “nonspeaker whisperer” for her expertise in treating nonverbal people. Anjeli, who is engaged to her partner Zoe, is older than she looks: She has “glints of silver in her black hair and lines around her eyes and lips—but her face was so animated, radiated so much energy, that she seemed much younger” (213). Initially, evidence seems to indicate that she and Adam were having an affair, but Anjeli is eventually revealed to be professional, kind, and devoted to her clients. On video, she affectionately teases Adam and Eugene—“‘I’m guessing you meant nuclear, Eugene, N-U-C-L-E-A-R.’ She looked offscreen and said teasingly, ‘I’m blaming you for this. Because you don’t say it properly, your poor son can’t spell it’” (220). During her interactions with Eugene and the other members of the family on Zoom, she insists on Eugene’s intelligence and verbal acuity, prompting Mia to reconsider her biases.