An excellent - so far - novel with a terrible title: The Promise of Happiness

Could there be a worse title for Justin Cartwright's 2005 novel, The Promise of Happiness? It sounds as if this is going to be one of those dreary, melodramatic, saccharine novels, indistinguishable from so many others, just begging to become a Lifetime movie (do they still make these?), yet from the first 60 pp or so Cartwright's book - well received in England but barely noted in the U.S. - is a sharp-edged, thoughtful, tense family drama told in an unusual but successful narrative style. In essence, the novel focuses on the members of an English family, roughly speaking Charles, the father, 60+, unwillingly cast into retirement when pushed out from his management job at a London firm and living in a small town on the Cornwall coast; his wife (Daphne?), a comically inept cook and the force that keeps the family going through its adversity; and the children, the eldest of whom, Juliet (Ju-ju) is about the be released from a prison in upstate New York. Cartwright moves easily among the POVs of each of the characters, really drawing us in, as few are able to do, to the interior life of each of these people; there's not exactly an omniscient narrator, but by giving us 5 or 6 close 3rd peson we end up knowing far more than any one of the characters does. He meticulous unspools the plot, so it's not till several chapters in that we know why Juliet was imprisoned, and it's clear there will be more developments, as her brother - Charlie - picks her up at the prison and prepares to travel with her back to a painful family gathering. Cartwright has a pretty good feel for the life and look of the U.S., despite a few missteps (e.g., the quote he extracts from a New Yorker short could never have appeared in that magazine) and a really sure hand at developing character through depicted action (the section with one of the daughters working on the set for the filming of a ridiculously overpriced commercial is excellent) and dialog (Juliet and Charlie conversing about the family is quite revelatory, and credible - though I wish he hadn't given Charlie the repeated inflection "like"). We'll see how this under-recognized novel develops.