Reviewed by Alexis David
Happier Far: Essays
by Diane Mehta
University of Georgia Press
March 2025, 176 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0820373287
There are some of us who experience life by observing. The observing becomes writing. The writing becomes story. And then, the story becomes meaning. Diane Mehta is one of these people. Happier Far is a book of essays. They are beautiful and truthful. In her essay, “The Ability to Oppose,” Mehta writes about being a writer, “I was no longer fit for much of anything besides writing if I wanted to have a heightened intellectual life. . .I wanted to argue as a way of being attentive and caring about things” (108). These essays do pay attention and they describe Mehta’s life lyrically, lusciously, “Perhaps my sense of myself as Indian diffused without the smells of salt air, diesel, betel nut, cotton, and roasted cumin” (21).
The title of the book, “Happier Far” (110) is from John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which Mehta reads when she is diagnosed with lupus:
Reading Paradise Lost would give me exactly what I needed: a grander story than the one I was living. It reminded me that verse was the vessel for my rhythm and beat, and reading the epic poem was my way of paying homage to the thing that had for so long invigorated my being: the line (109).
In Paradise Lost, the archangel, Michael, tells Adam and Eve, as they are leaving paradise, that “the real paradise, beyond Earth and Eden, depends on your heart” (110). It is a place inside you, different from Eden. As Mehta explains, “It is your actions that are meaningful. It is how you discharge your free will and how you are disobedient” (110); “deeds, faith, virtue, patience, temperance, love, and charity” (110) help to create this inner paradise. This is a truly beautiful, existential essay about looking into the stars and wondering about both her own “disobedience” and the way the lupus inside of her rebelled against her body. Mehta ends this essay in the most physical, muddy way possible, “I trekked up the path, indifferent to the boggy grass and loose rocks and didn’t look up again. I walked between the stilts that kept the house standing when the river rose, and banged my clogs hard on the stairs going up” (112). It is clear Mehta is a poet as this essay turns, just like a poem. The reader is taken from Milton and the mysteriousness of our individual life among heaven and the stars and then right back down into the ground, into the house that will not float away when the rains come.
This book is about both the past, the childhood that informed Mehta, and her view of her own future. She examines the world around and inside her in three parts: “Unreal History of my Childhood,” “Making Love out of Memories” and “Becoming Relentless.” Structurally, this format is soothing. It feels both chronological and also like a crescendo, leading up to my favorite essay “Year of the Horse” (123).
In part one, we know Mehta as a child, who seems to exist as an invisible other, “I’d spent my whole life, since immigrating from India, feeling invisible in a shiny new country that seemed not to care much about me. Half a lifetime later, I still feel invisible so relentlessly that I think I have no choice but to embrace this invisibility as the real me” (18). This line became my touchstone for these first essays: the invisibility of immigrants.
Mehta was born in Frankfurt in 1966. Her mother was Jewish-American and her father is Indian Jain. In her childhood, there is a slight distance between Mehta and other people: “My mother gave birth to me alone, in a foreign country, an omen of loneliness to come” (1). Part three echoed this loneliness, only satisfying it with Mehta’s connection to other people. She explains how she began to swim as an adjustment to an aging body, diagnosed with lupus, “Things happened in quiet, slight resistance” (140). For instance, a woman who is swimming in her lane touches her foot. Mehta responds with, “What are you doing? Stop touching my foot!” (141). I found this funny (it reminded me of my sister) and symbolic of the book. Mehta, at first, resists connection with other people, but then ends up falling love with the various swimmers at her pool. This essay is quietly placed at the end and reads as an acceptance of herself. Swimming with these strangers, in the pool at the YMCA, becomes a place where Metha is seen. It is here where “for those twelve minutes, the blue world is impossibly clear, and my pain is gone” (149).
Previously, I reviewed Mehta’s book of poems, Tiny Extravaganzas and found Happier Far to also pay close attention to music. In her essay, “The Ability to Oppose,” Mehta writes about a trip to Texas with her partner, Jerry, and her son. She looked up to the night sky and “felt the brevity of my short life” (106). The unfamiliar sky becomes “a harp whose strings had discovered that they could rearrange their molecules and so they continually repositioned themselves around the music they were playing as they played it” (107). In her book of poems, she writes, “You have to fill your cartilage ears with harmonies/of chainsaws and the claw of useful verbs” (93). Mehta’s mind thinks in music. We understand this musical schema because of Mehta’s mother, who took her to the symphony when she was a child. Mehta describes the feeling she had after the concert, “by the time I returned to our night-sky driveway I would have violins and trumpets in my bones” (46). Currently, Mehta is the poet-in-residence at New Chamber Ballet. Knowing this conjures up a sweet sensation, like the taste of honey on the tongue. Mehta’s mother gave her an appreciation for the opera and now she spends her life surrounded by music notes and poems. How comforting.
My only criticism of the collection is Mehta’s choice to end this lyrical, lush, gorgeous book with an essay called “Killing a Bat.” Mehta describes a residency in an Italian castle that “changed the feeling of the air itself. The stones smelled like old maps and lime” (150). Here, a bat appears in her room because it’s Europe and the castle’s windows don’t have screens. The baby bat has something wrong with it and won’t leave her room. Mehta agrees that a tall person in the group will kill it. She ends the collection with the line, “I cursed the window, bolted it shut, and sat down in my chair to work” (156). This ending absolutely haunted me. It threw me into a nihilistic panic, questioning, “What does the bat symbolize?” Wild nature? Demons? Satan from Paradise Lost? It was a mystery after such a fulfilling collection of essays. I wanted Mehta to tuck this gruesome bat story into the middle of the book, somewhere hidden and quiet. However, she didn’t. She ends the book with it. This essay takes up serious real estate.
However, maybe the bat is the perfect ending. She has, in this truly gorgeous collection, documented the paradise within her mind. In Paradise Lost, the archangel tells Adam and Eve “the knowledge of all the tyrannies and carnage to come” (110). Killing the bat is carnage. Mehta writes, “I’d always been a killer, but I didn’t know it until a bat flew into the castle” (150). This Italian castle is similar to Adam and Eve’s paradise: “The castle cradled me in darkness to protect me, but I wonder if the only thing I needed protection from was myself” (150). And, perhaps this is the point: it is our minds that are important; as Mehta writes earlier, “I too will make my way into my future, Happier Far” (110). I wanted Mehta to be all good. I didn’t want her to kill the bat, but perhaps these essays are explorations of both Mehta’s goodness and badness. As she writes, in this same essay, “In order to become an artist you have to understand how to become a whole person without being complete” (153).
About the reviewer: Alexis David is a poet and fiction writer who holds a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, an M.Ed from Canisius College and an MFA from New England College. Dancing Girl Press published her chapbook The Names of Animals I Have Loved. Additionally, she has placed reviews of poetry for Tupelo Quarterly, North of Oxford, Compulsive Reader and The Masters Review. Links to her other published work can be found here: https://alexisldavid.wixsite.com/alexis.