Happy are the Happy by Yasmina Reza

Yasmina Reza is well acquainted with the torments of the bourgeoisie; just watch her stage masterwork The God of Carnage for proof. So it's no surprise when she adopts a similar yet fiercer approach to them in Happy are the Happy, a series of vignettes from 18 loosely connected members of the French chattering classes. She builds a bonfire for their vanities, remaining complicit by allowing each to self-immolate. We are shown the vulgar and the self-important – trapped in lives they despise, bound by conformity while perching at the peak of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – whose most acute life challenge is cheese; shrieking publically and embarrassingly, “Who likes bloody Morbier?!”

Reza’s prose is natural, true and steeped in each character, yet it is the space between these words – as in Browning’s My Last Duchess – that reveals all during each separate short diatribe. Condescension drips from politician Odile Toscano like the champagne off her socialism, while her unhappy mother, Jeannette Blot, laments a life stifled by the etiquette of her class. "What does it mean to have a man in one’s life? Look at me, with one on paper but none in my life."

Thankfully there is dark laughter to fish from this pool of melancholy, where fear, age and ill health loom large, most often characterised by the spectre of cancer, an obvious but relevant metaphor for a society in decay. [Alan Bett]