refreshingly blithe belief that "one is always foolish until one is correct"—the carefully polished attitude we used to get from the high-spirited, tuxedoed boy/men of Forties movies. (p. 63)

It's bright, it's funny, and it's very very willful; Colwin is out to invent not only a Seventies comedy of manners but the manners themselves. What makes the book special fun are the tartly endearing reversals: The girls are close-to-the-vest and tentative, while the slightly boobish boys roll with the punches, secure in their eagerness to love, attend, and do their full duty. Colwin writes effervescently—if the book has a flaw, it's that there is a sludgy build-up of adorable-ness. But a thirtyish book it remains. The personal, dependent on quick wits, good will, and high hopes, is still the lifeboat. (p. 64)

Ross Feld, in Saturday Review (© 1978 by Saturday Review Magazine Corp.; reprinted with permission), October 10, 1978.

We've been waiting, haven't we, for a writer with glad gifts? By which I mean a writer with delicacy, affection and wit to sing for us the well-adjusted joys of the on-the-whole-quite-happy-thank-you life…. Well, Laurie Colwin's "Happy All the Time" is our chance; and I hereby wish my fellow fortunates joy of our collective self-image.

It's a lovely book: I mean it. The people in it are nice and better than nice. Laurie Colwin writes a sentence of porcelain-like clarity, to use an adjective she favors. Her book has the elegance called Mozartian—pretty themes, memorable melodies. The four people in it are a kind of quartet, a counterpoint of character-types, and their effect is harmony. If I found myself hoping, halfway through, that a busload of underprivileged kids with tommy-guns would disembark in the novel's sunny landscape, this should perhaps be chalked up to some morbid restlessness of my own.

Here are the details. Like all smiling social comedies since "As You Like It," "Happy All the Time" features two couples, men and women deeply right for each other if only they would realize it; which they do, in plenty of time to toast each other's happiness in the last scene. There are Vincent and Misty, Guido and Holly. They all have been to good schools, wear clothes well and have enough money. They all have settled into a good career by age 30 or so, except Holly…. The crisis, such as it is, comes when Holly picks up and leaves on an unannounced, indefinite vacation the very day she tells Guido she's pregnant. Though he's not very disconcerted—no one is very anything here—he does at least threaten to become unhappy.

It's at such a pass as this that one feels that Laurie Colwin's china shop is badly in need of a bull…. None of [the male spouses of my acquaintances], I hope, would be satisfied, as Guido is, by the amiable lack of profundity he's offered by Misty, his best friend's wife, when he goes to her with his confusion….

Misty herself is a self-styled "scourge of God," which means in context that, unlike the three others, she doubts (a little) that we're all having a swell time. She has an expression on her face that Vincent calls "the only Jew at the dinner table." As for Vincent, whereas Guido is too analytical, it's feared that Vincent isn't analytical enough. My own opinion is that no one in this dollhouse of a book has anything to worry his little head about. Laurie Colwin is not going to let bogeymen—erotic or fiscal or even psychological—move in next door.

So you're going to enjoy this book, because it's charming and funny, but I warn you that you may feel, from page to page, like "the only Jew at the dinner table." Nor is this mere grouchiness. Happiness itself, after all, is a complex and volatile state; it has less to do with brightness and neatness than with energy and desire. Laurie Colwin's art—and art it is, and a joy—gives the impression that it's just plain afraid of energy and desire. Without them, the happiness she can portray must ring, for the Analytical, a little thin. (p. 14)

John Romano, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1978 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), November 19, 1978.

Laurie Colwin's Happy All the Time miraculously, uncloyingly describes two happy couples who enjoy their lives; this delicious book has the sweetness of Così Fan Tutte without its shadows….

Conditioned by literary experience, we read edgily at first, suspecting all the pleasantness, waiting for the terrible blow to fall. It doesn't. Gradually we relax and yield to the celebration of healthy relationships, benign pleasures, and creature comforts, for which it is possible to develop an agreeable and pleasing appetite…. Such pleasures would be objectionable if they were totally bland, but [Colwin] produces the literary equivalent of the anchovy—a prickly character, a threatening event—to relieve the sweetness.

Aristotle ennobled the digestive metaphor when he spoke of the catharsis of tragedy. Indeed the signal characteristic of great art may be its power to trouble the viscera, and our greatest artists may continue to be dyspeptic. Still, there is no intrinsic superiority in a bad digestion and a cranky temper. Let a comfortable word be said for the artist of cheerful, eupeptic disposition. (p. 83)

Frances Taliaferro, in Harper's (copyright © 1979 by Harper's Magazine; all rights reserved; excerpted from the April, 1979 issue by special permission), April, 1979.