Jessica, people with artistic ambition address sadness and misery because they're trying to work out the problems of existence, and where's the problem with happiness? 'Happy families are all the same, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' (Tolstoy-- it's either from Anna Karenina or the short story Family Happiness) This is wrong! wrong! wrong! But its certainly easier to find the complications that make good stories and subtle art where there is unhappiness.
Whenever you see an unambiguously happy family that loves each other in current literature or movies, you can be sure it's a horror story and the monster's about to leap out, or a war movie and they're all to be divided into refugee camps, or a legal thriller, and someone's going to jail wrongly accused. On the other hand, an unhappy family can just sit there being dysfunctional when it's Thanksgiving, and that's a story.
If the family's functional you need an external threat to drive the story. It's a shame, because exploring happiness is one of the great uncharted frontiers in literature. Where can the story go? What plot beyond 'slice of life, pleasant time, nothing happens' can we find?
It's worth exploring, because in real life, a happy family, like a good group of friends or a couple in love, is electric. When it surrounds you, it's intoxicating. Maybe we need installation plots to depict this --there's something about being within a network of human connections that make you more yourself that is very difficult to capture in literature.
When I go home to see my family, and we welcome each other and begin to pass a joke from one to another, each of us giving it our own spin, it's as if we've all taken on an electric charge-- everyone's on, everyone sparkles, sparks fly from our fingers, our hair stands on end and ball lightnening rolls around the room. At least, that's how it feels. (As a child I went to the Franklin Museum for a show on electricity, and it made a big impression on me.)
It's something I like very much about Tolkien, how well and lovingly he captures frienship and fellowship, though his plots, of course, are almost always driven by an external threat. (Leaf by Niggle would be an exception, --the threat to Niggle is his time running out before he can complete his great portrait of a huge and lovely tree-- but the friendship there is dysfunctional, which unfortunately supports my point. It's in the Tolkien Reader, but I don't know whether it's in print now.) Can there be a happy family or a loving fellowship of friends that confronts a challenge or otherwise needs to change, but for reasons within them?
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