I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder review – romance for the terminally online

What makes this love story fresh is the precise attention to the contemporary environment: the way characters live both in and out of the physical world

The opening section of I Want You to Be Happy is an excellently droll and surefooted description of a man and a woman meeting in a bar, trying to make conversation over the music and flirting vaguely. They establish that she is 23 and that he is 35. All the specifics – the name or location of the bar, the music, even the names of the couple – are for now redacted: “After a while, the twenty-three-year-old woman raised her voice and, referring to the thirty-five-year-old man, asked her short-haired friend: ‘How old do you think he is?’ The short-haired friend surveyed the thirty-five-year-old man’s face; thought for a moment. ‘Forty?’ The twenty-three-year-old woman snort-laughed. ‘He’s thirty-five.’”

Jem Calder, like his protagonists, is bang on trend. His 2022 short story collection, Reward System, was widely admired; this debut novel employs a factual and affectless prose of the sort you’d find in Sally Rooney or Vincenzo Latronico, with a fastidious attention to the surfaces of the world that suggests Nicholson Baker or Bret Easton Ellis or even early Don DeLillo humming in the background. As that opening suggests, these figures are, or could be, representative.

In some ways, they are. Not much happens. Boy meets girl. Girl has hopes. Boy has drink problem. Boy and girl are happy for a bit, then they aren’t. Tale as old as time. But what’s fresh about it is the book’s precise attention to the environment in which such a story now takes place. It’s all rental ebikes, vapes, meal-replacement protein shakes, Slack channels and push notifications. The characters lightly cyberstalk each other, they agonise over whether they’ve responded to texts too quickly or too slowly, and their difference in age is even calibrated by their texting style (the older Chuck uses capital letters and punctuation; the younger Joey generally doesn’t).

A passage such as the following one, for instance, ostensibly tells the reader nothing very much at all but in fact tells them quite a bit:

Walking home, she put in her earphones and streamed a new album by her favourite singer-songwriter: the album’s release having been brought to her attention via push notification earlier that day. This new album wasn’t as good as the singer-songwriter’s older ones – or else Joey wasn’t in the right mood for it – so she navigated to the singer-songwriter’s artist page and played the songs she already liked. Listening to these familiar songs, she sang along under her breath, alternately joining in with the lead or backup vocal lines wherever they required least effort.

The characters here live both in and out of the physical world, and everything is so mediated that reality itself comes to seem secondary. One of them jokes that cigarettes are a herbal alternative to vapes – they have stolen the gag from a meme they’ve seen. At another point, which seems to me a very nice touch: “In the morning she showered while he slept. For a tired moment, she thought it was funny that his shower gel smelled like him, before it clicked that he obviously just smelled like the shower gel.”

In such a world, who’d want to make art? Actually, both our protagonists. Joey is a would-be poet working as a barista; Chuck is a would-be novelist working as an advertising copywriter. Chuck’s work in progress is called Paradigms and it’s just as terrible as the title suggests. The plot hinges on it.

Calder’s flamboyant flatness of style, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, means that when he does unroll something a bit flashier, you really notice it. He loves a noun turning into a verb (“axised”, “pendulumed”, “elevatored”), or a verb disappearing altogether, and the odd Joycean portmanteau appears as if to underline that the style is a choice rather than the symptom of a limitation: “Outside now, the nightwide sky with nothing in it save for the glittering anti-collision lights of planes in low airspace”; “Old detached farmhouses, their sunrise-facing sides lit alpenglow pink.”

He’s good on rain, too. We meet, for instance, “a low, mizzling rain that appeared to be precipitating spontaneously at person level in mid-air rather than falling from any higher source”. Later, Joey and her friends “waited in the faint, aerosol-like rain for 15 minutes”. And, perhaps best of all: “On her walk home it rained a kind of rain Joey always referred to in her head as ‘wet rain’.”

In some ways, under the surface, this is a warm and quite an old-fashioned sort of thing: a proper novel. Its protagonists have inner lives; their feelings are important to them, and us. The turn-and-turn-about third-person narration allows Calder unobtrusively to make clear the disjunctions between how they see each other and how they see themselves, and to watch their attempts to mediate their personae in the digital spaces in which we now half live. Man, you find yourself thinking: it’s tough out there for singles.

• I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com