For some time, I’ve had a fantasy of writing an advice column in which readers would ask me various questions about the nature of love and marriage and children and money, and I would respond to all questions with the same answer:
Be lucky. How can you be successful? Be born into the right family; have good teachers in elementary school. How can you be happy in love? Find the right man or woman. How can you raise children you’re proud of? Give birth to nice children. In everything that matters, it is way better to be lucky than good. Luck rules. Everything else is negligible by comparison.
I may have to suspend my dream of such a column, however, since Ann Patchett’s new collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, makes roughly the same point, but perfectly. All of the essays, which have been collected from her magazine work over two decades, are excellent. Patchett writes enviable prose fluid,
simple, direct, clear, and fearless — and she writes about many things — food, working as a waitress, opening and running a bookstore. But in collections like this one, there’s always a best chocolate in the box. In this case, the standout is the title piece about the nature of marriage.
