Don't worry, be happy! Worry, don't be happy!

Forget the problem of evil. The problem of goodness gets all the attention lately. Nick Hornby took a stab with "How To Be Good," a comic novel just out in paperback that shows the destruction of an average family when Dad devotes his life to charity. Carol Shields's recent "Unless" pursues essentially the same plot, but this time, it's the daughter who disrupts life with her decision to drop out of college and pursue virtue. And now, let's all give a warm Monitor hug to "Happiness(TM)," a zany comedy by Will Ferguson in which the world is derailed by the ultimate self-help book.

One theme is clear in these witty novels: Goodness is boring. And a radical pursuit of goodness is downright dangerous. Of course, they're not the first to come to that conclusion. No less a Puritan than John Milton gave all the good lines in "Paradise Lost" to Satan, while Christ is a sort of obsequious doormat, the kind of person you'd like to live next door to, but never hang out with.

In Hornby's "How To Be Good," the first symptom of Dad's devotion to charity is an alarming drop in sarcasm. Suddenly, he speaks with "the slow, over-confident patience of a recently created angel ... in phrases from 'Thought for the Day.' " His wife assumes he's suffered some kind of brain damage.

The mother in Shields's "Unless" notices a similarly frightening change in her daughter. She sits on a street corner begging – "brimming with goodness," her voice "emptied of connection." The narrator checks out a book from the library called "The Goodness Gap" and makes a half-hearted effort to understand her daughter's pursuit of virtue, but deep down she's terrified by such radicalism. She can't help regarding her own quest for goodness with light doses of irony.

In "Happiness(TM)," Ferguson prefers vats of bitter sarcasm to light doses of irony. He's written what he calls "Apocalypse Nice," a story that "tells of a devastating plague of human happiness, an epidemic of warm fuzzy hugs." He confesses in the introduction that the novel grew out of a casual comment by a publicist: "If anyone ever wrote a self-help book that actually worked, we'd all be in trouble."

This "what if" premise doesn't make for the most profound exploration into the nature of goodness. "Happiness(TM)" is to theology as "Flubber" is to chemistry, but it's still sometimes very funny.

The narrator is a glib misanthrope named Edwin. Since abandoning his original career plans to become a professional bon vivant, he's worked as a nonfiction editor for a large New York publishing firm. Panderic publishes 250 books a year "that range from celebrity diet fads to 40-pound vampire gothics." Much of his time is spent wading through the slush pile of manuscripts, "where dreams come to die." He's looking for something "so humorless and slowly paced, so plodding and laden with arcana, that you just know it has to be Great Literature."

Page: 1 | 2