My American Unhappiness - Hardcover

“My American Unhappiness is a major accomplishment from one of my generation’s finest storytellers, a profoundly funny, moving, beautifully-detailed, and ultimately hopeful portrait of our country in a certain moment.”—Davy Rothbart, founder and editor of Found

A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders of strangers, a quixotic renegade when it comes to the federal bureaucracy, and a devoted believer in the afternoon cocktail and the evening binge, Zeke Pappas is a thirty-three-year-old scholar who asks almost everybody he meets “Why are you so unhappy?” The answers he receives—a mix of true sadness and absurd complaint—become the core of his obsessive project, “The Inventory of American Unhappiness.” Zeke, meanwhile, remains delightfully oblivious to the increasingly harsh realities that threaten his daily routine, opting instead to focus his energy on finding the perfect mate so that he can gain custody of his orphaned nieces. Following steps outlined in a women’s magazine, the ever-optimistic Zeke identifies some “prospects”: a newly divorced neighbor, a coffeehouse barista, his administrative assistant, and Sofia Coppola (“Why not aim high?”).

        One of the most charmingly deluded narrators to come along in years, Zeke has an irreverent voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit and heart-on-sleeve emotion, underscored by a creeping paranoia and made more urgent by the hope that if he can only find a wife, he might have a second chance at life.

“My American Unhappiness is a smart, funny, charming novel—an incisive critique of the way we live now, but armed, unlike most contemporary satire, with a big, generous heart. I got addicted to the misadventures of Zeke Pappas. I didn’t want the book to end.”—Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

“In Zeke Pappas, Dean Bakopoulos has invented a man for all rainy seasons—a horny, heartbroken cousin of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, telling a long, tall tale of anomie in the heartland.”—Tom Piazza, author of Why New Orleans Matters

“If the nature of despair, as Kierkegaard wrote, is to be unaware of itself, then Zeke Pappas is its perfect spokesman: a blithely deluded nebbish whose epic longings—to document the emptiness at the center of American life and to win the heart of Sofia Coppola and/or his local Starbucks barista—propel him into ever more twisted predicaments. There’s no such thing as unhappiness when you’re holding a Dean Bakopoulos novel in your hands.”—Jonathan Miles, author of Dear American Airlines

“Vivid as a searchlight gliding across suburban picture windows, My American Unhappiness displays its author’s saddened comic wisdom, as apparently self-effacing as it is marvelously inventive and observant. Dean Bakopoulos is a writer to watch, a novelist to cherish.”—Peter Straub, author of A Dark Matter