Debra Spark: Cheer Up—Why Don’t You? (July 2002)

“In literature,” Debra Spark quotes Janet Burroway, “only trouble is interesting.  Only trouble.”  Is there any room for happiness in fiction?  What might “happy fiction” look like?  Spark considers different kinds of happiness—including the formal satisfactions of a work itself— and how happiness manifests in fiction by Anton Chekhov, Laurie Colwin, Bill Roorbach and Barbara Klein Moss.