57 pages • 1 hour read
Angie KimHappiness Falls
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Music
Mia’s narration includes numerous references to music, describing experiences in terms of notes and tonal qualities. Mia has perfect pitch, so she thinks of everyday sounds, like a dial tone, as notes: “the dissonance of the almost-A-and-F quasi-chord” (60). Music thus functions as her unique and visceral way of experiencing the world.
Mia uses music to order and analyze the experiences of her otherwise hard to understand brother. Impressed by Eugene’s “splaughs,” or repetitive vocalizations, she remembers “being awed by Eugene’s stamina, his ability to sustain such amplitude for so long without getting hoarse; our choir teacher would go crazy for his vocal technique and the precision of his rhythm” (164).
Music also functions as a symbol of liminal states between uncertainty and understanding. For example, Mia imagines complex emotions, such as hope mixed with grief, as symphonic works: “our collective hope became this palpable thing [...] I heard it in my head, this anthem in G major, could already feel the tears of joy and relief, of sadness too, for Dad” (273). Within the imagined piece of music, both positive and negative possibilities exist. Developing the theme of Language and Silence, the novel’s uses music to complicate readers’ ideas of what can be conveyed using non-language modes of communication.
Smiles and Masks
Images of smiles and masks symbolize the interrelation of appearance and reality.
Involuntary smiles and laughter are symptoms of Eugene’s Angelman syndrome, and Mia often imagines a contrast between his facial expression and what he may be feeling: The “incongruence with his upturned smile adding to the sense of his lips being painted on, a nightmare clown act” (59). Smiles can also be revelatory. When a terrified Adam found her, John, and Eugene in the graveyard the night they stayed out overnight, “his face morphed in the dawning light, like one of those tricks where a clown wipes a frown into a smile, but intensified to the hundredth power—crucifying agony, wipe, rapturous elation” (86). The many moods displayed on Adam’s face, which are reactions to the many possible things that could have happened to the children—echo the novel’s interest in how close alternate realities can be to actual events.
Masks in the novel aren’t simply figurative, but literal as well, as characters wear protective equipment due to the pandemic. Masks provide cover in a variety of ways: Mia notes that “sometimes we smile to cover up deep shame” (341), while Eugene’s “wearing a COVID mask made it easier for me to read his emotions, to filter out the smile and focus in on his eyes, eyebrows, forehead” (117). Masks thus emphasize that outward expressions can differ from inward experience, like a “smile masking the trauma of being belittled” (226).
Written Artifacts
Written artifacts are a prevalent motif in the narrative—and in the metafictional revelation that Mia has been writing and burns the novel we are reading—exemplified by the elements of academic writing that Mia includes in her narrative, such as footnotes, tables, and charts.
In-world artifacts include Adam’s HQ notebook, real and/or fabricated versions of his notes about his conversation with Eugene, and the transcriptions of Eugene’s letterboard spelling. Angie Kim provides vivid descriptions of these written objects, which are deeply meaningful to a family of intellectual academics. “Dad’s multicolored writing on the wavy, crinkled drying pages” prompts Mia to think that this notebook “might become a family keepsake,” and that the best way to remember her father is to preserve “nearness to this repository of ideas” (149).
The inclusion of philosophical, academic writing and the novel’s metafictional elements contribute to the ambiguity that subverts the mystery genre. More importantly, the weight of written artifacts contributes to the novel’s treatment of Language and Silence. Biases against Eugene as nonverbal contrast sharply with the rest of the family’s logorrhea; the eventual discovery that Eugene can communicate via writing dismantles the assumption that he is less of a person and allows him to join the rest of the family’s hyper-communicative style. The fact that Eugene is eventually able to communicate—he is nonspeaking, rather than nonverbal—enhances the significance of written communication, particularly the transcripts of Eugene’s conversations via letterboard.
