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I like the way you've contrasted the subjectivity of happiness for each person with Powers' description of the impossibility of new stories. I think it goes especially well with the fact that Powers decided to make one person the paragon of happiness, against which the happiness of all the other characters has to be judged. But who says that Thassa's experience of happiness is the happiness other people experience? Does the ability to roll with life's punches and come out smiling apply to the happiness Russell and Candace experience together? Does her "infallible" good mood surpass the joy Gabe feels playing his computer games? Powers tries to tell us that no stories are new and to avoid reduction in terms of happiness, yet he populates his story with characters widely differing in emotional states who are forced to compare their experience of happiness to Thassa's. In trying to tell us there is no new story, he brings to life a dozen characters with rich stories of their own; in trying to tell us that happiness is a unique experience born of genetic variation and live experience, he forces all of those emotionally different characters to standardize themselves based on one character's experience.