All the Happiness You Deserve

Piafsky’s debut novel uses tarot as a unifying device to bring together 78 short chapters, one for each card in the deck. The chapters, which generally correspond thematically to their given cards, read more like vignettes or very short stories than traditional chapters (one, in fact, was previously published as a standalone story). Beginning with the unnamed protagonist’s middle-American childhood, the novel progresses more or less chronologically through life events both major and minor, including his older sister’s sudden death, his parents’ subsequent breakup, love affairs, marriage, fatherhood, and middle age. At times, readers may grow wistful for the thoughtful, philosophical boy who, in his fifth-grade teacher’s words “goes somewhere very far away, somewhere deep inside his mind.” By midlife, that boy’s been replaced by an often-obnoxious financial professional more interested in the trappings of success than in the life of the mind. Only near the novel’s end does some of his introspection return–this time after events that seem to echo those experienced by his father decades earlier. There are some transcendent moments here, particularly in the early chapters, but Piafsky’s narrator is too frequently crass and thoughtless to convince as the everyman he seems intended to be. Agent: Chris Kepner, Victoria Sanders & Associates. (Feb.)