The first paragraph of “The Argonauts” is anchored by a simple question: “What’s your pleasure?” It’s directed at the narrator by Harry, during one of their early nights together, and the answer in that moment is, literally, concrete — “my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad” — and suffused with the intoxication of early romance: “You had ‘Molloy’ by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better?” Does it get any better? It’s a rhetorical question meant to evoke a particular kind of peak experience — the early stages of infatuation, that blinding bliss — but the question also plays out across the arc of the book, as that initial thrill gives way to enduring intimacy. What’s your pleasure? The text keeps circling back to this question, not answering so much as expanding it: Where do we find pleasure? How do we share it with others? How do we find language for it? How do we create narratives that hold the kinds of happiness that exist not in superlative moments but across longer durations: “The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion.”

When describing the illness of her infant son, Iggy, Nelson refuses to narrate that pain. “I am not going to write anything here about Iggy’s time with the toxin,” she writes. “It is not precious or rich to me.” But then she does write about it, if only for the space of a long sentence: “All I will say is that there is still a loop of time, or there is still a part of me, that is removing the side of a raised hospital crib in the morning light and climbing into it beside him, unwilling to move or let go or keep living until he lifted his head, until he gave any sign that he would make it out.” Nelson has already declared that she is turning away from this pain as her primary subject. Instead, she will attempt to find precise language for gratitude and the exaltation of ordinary health, for happiness that is enduring rather than momentary: “When Iggy had the toxin and we lay with him in his hospital crib, I knew — in a flood of fear and panic — what I know now, in our blessed return to the land of health, which is that my time with him has been the happiest time of my life. Its happiness has been of a more palpable and undeniable and unmitigated quality than any I’ve ever known. For it isn’t just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It’s a happiness that spreads.”

This rumination on happiness points toward the vast range of aesthetic alternatives to sadness as a default narrative posture. It acts as an invocation — or, at least, an invitation — to think of happiness as something that might sharpen our thinking into focus, rather than blunting it. It suggests that What’s your pleasure? is a question that might direct us toward as much profundity as What’s your damage? It suggests that depictions of intimacy, delight and satisfaction might hold a different dialect of nuance than the drunken ramblings of Sasha at the Parisian bar; might offer even richer ways of bringing consciousness to the page.