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.
Part 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6: “A Hundred Days”
Part 6, Chapter 33 Summary: “Zebras, Unicorns, and Occam’s Razor”
Three months have passed since Adam’s disappearance. Eugene has been attending group sessions at Anjeli’s; he and other nonverbal patients have composed a group poem with the refrain “I am here” (355). The family is unable to discern whether Adam had cancer, or what the last HQ experiment was.
Mia still feels uneasy, wondering whether Eugene just repeated her speculations about Adam’s death with John. Having found a page from Adam’s folder on the copier tray, she wonders whether it had been used for tracing and whether Hannah and John fabricated the two-page note that exonerates Eugene and corroborates his story. Mia is also suspicious of Eugene’s use of abbreviation, since Anjeli mentioned him being a perfectionist with spelling.
Mia figures out Adam’s phone password, and considers unlocking it to find out definitively about the note (which Eugene said Adam photographed); however, with the last password attempt, she decides to enter a wrong digit, and the phone deletes its data.
Part 6, Chapter 34 Summary: “Hidden Bright Moon”
On the 100th day after Adam’s disappearance, the family prepares for a ceremony at the waterfall. Mia arrives early to burn the account she’s written of what has happened to her family, including all her “ugly thoughts” (370). Her manuscript begins with the line “We didn’t call the police right away” (370), the first line of the novel. Mia also has a gift for Eugene—a giant touch screen tablet designed to mirror the letterboard and equipped with a text-to-voice function.
Part 6 Analysis
In the climactic moment of Mia’s character trajectory, she forgoes the desire to seek certainty and resolution in favor of her family’s best interests. Inspired by Shannon’s argument for focusing on the living—“I don’t care if we ever find out what happened; having no answer at all is better than having an answer that implicates Eugene” (365)—Mia decides to enter the wrong passcode digit on Adam’s phone and erase whatever evidence it holds. Possibly, it could have contained photos corroborating Eugene’s narrative; equally probably, it could have revealed Hannah and John to have fabricated evidence. Mia’s choice underscores the importance of Unbreakable Family Connections, as she lets go of her doubts and puts trust in her family.
This section of the novel includes images in addition to prose. They function similarly to the footnotes, adding another layer of academese with research-paper style figures and graphs. In one figure, Mia charts whether Eugene’s story, the shared vision, and the two-page note could be real or fabricated. Her analysis of this data shows her transformation as a character: She believes “the ideal, best-case scenario: everything happened exactly the way Eugene said it did [...] the only thing I waver on is the co-vision I had with John” (358). This remaining ambiguity subverts the generic expectation that the mystery will be definitively solved.
The novel’s metafictional components, like visuals and footnotes, add to its philosophical bent and draw attention to its blended genre. Mia’s manuscript, which is ostensibly the novel the reader has been reading, since it begins with the first line of Happiness Falls, prompts the reader to view the novel differently in retrospect, knowing that Mia wrote it as a response to Adam’s disappearance. The abrupt shift to present tense in the last chapter of the novel, as Mia burns what she has written, emphasizes the novel’s self-aware quality: “So here I am. Sitting on the ground at the falls overlook spot, my palms dirty and pockmarked with tiny gravel-pressed dents, our family’s story in my hands” (370). Kim also includes direct references to genre, as Mia vows to stay away from reading or watching anything “‘twisty’ or ‘thrillery’” (359), which prompts the reader to question how they would categorize Happiness Falls.
