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: