Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness

A LIFE OF ADVENTURE AND DE- LIGHT by Akhil Sharma. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York. 202 pages. wwnorton.com $24.95 hardcover.

- Jeanne E. Fredriksen

From the award-winning author of An Obedient Father (2001 Hemingway Foundation PEN Award) and Family Life (2014 New York Times Best Books of the Year; 2015 Folio Prize; and 2016 International DUBLIN Literary Award), comes a collection of short stories that entertains and spares no one. In Akhil Sharma’s A Life of Adventure and Delight, eight stories explore the quest for perceptible love, the life and liberty of relationships, and the perpetual pursuit of happiness.

Each story is built on profiles of characters old and young, flawed and beautiful, traditional and modern, all searching for a sense of love or at the very least belonging. However, whether they learn from their mistakes is at the core of each protagonist.

At times Sharma employs short, sharp sentences that reflect a Hemingway-esque clarity and precision. His writing is neither pedantic nor oratory, leaving the grist in the details proficiently enough to evoke varying levels of humor in despair.

The collection is built on missteps, selfishness, lack of communication, and unshakeable tradition. Yet there is wit, and there is hope—two things without which these stories would be far less powerful. The collection’s title is ironic, for there is little adventure in the stories and even less one would call delight. They are stories that have no conventional beginning, middle, or end. They are, separate and together, slices of life, glimpses into the human condition.

The opening story, “Cosmopolitan” and the title story, “A Life of Adventure and Delight” are possibly the two most sadly humorous of all. Both speak to a sexual naiveté and a desire to be more than one’s former self.