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 –...

By Sam Leith