Mike, the perfectly healthy first-person narrator of A Happy Death, a comic novel, wants to die. Thanks to modern medicine and diet control and a life spent safely sitting down, he will likely live to the ripe eighties or beyond to the overripe nineties, but he’d be happy to end before then. Well before then. Mike decides his current age of fifty-something is advanced enough. He’s seen his marriage fail, his daughter grow up into a shrew, and his retirement from The Aspirin Institute after a career of twenty-six years soured by regret and emptiness. There’s nothing more to live for. But there’s a surprise catch: Things to live for keep turning up.
Odd things, such as buying shoes for the strange women he drives across the country in a van he calls his woody as they write up his blog The Driver’s Journal.
