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The protagonist of Meg Mason’s new book, the follow-up to the 2020 tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, is an invisible woman. She might well be standing there but you won’t notice her. She’s a techie at literary festivals – the person who shuffles up to a famous writer a few minutes before their event and apologetically slides a microphone cable down their shirt while they’re making small talk with the chair or accepting a bottle of room-temperature mineral water from an anxious publicist.
No man is a hero to his valet, and no writer is a hero to the technical staff lurking in the wings of a venue. Mason’s opening pages present a teasing but not quite libellous series of cameos of real writers: George Saunders deciding at an inconsiderately late stage to insist on swapping his headset for a lapel mic; Ann Patchett being frosty with a fan; Mick Herron accidentally stepping on someone’s foot and not apologising.
Sophie lurks in the wings of her own life, too. She likes her job but she has much to be sad about. Not long ago, her husband brought their relationship to an end with oafish callousness (she was in the shower; he didn’t bother to take his earbuds out while he delivered the news), and with it her hope of becoming a mother. Now her beloved books are in storage in the garage of her old house and she’s living alone in a dingy rental flat owned by her husband: “The water in Sophie’s glass tasted like pipes. She felt very tired … The coffee table was actually a cable spool with ‘12 AWG’ spray-painted on the drum.”
Mason’s prose is wan and witty, handling the admixture of pathos and bathos well; and her sinuous sentences capture the wavering movements of thought with less fuss and more laughs than, say, Virginia Woolf. As a bookish person, and one inhabiting a lightly metafictional narrative, Sophie is glumly aware of her literary analogues. There’s “a lot of sad girl fiction” on her Kindle. “Eleanor Oliphant,” she reflects. “That was the worst. Even though it was extremely well written and Sophie had recommended it to about 10 people when it first came out, in this moment, she wished she’d never heard of it and couldn’t recall the cheese scones and those cappuccinos Eleanor always ordered, the saddest of all the coffees.”
Mason is brilliant, too, at describing the small but intense joys of everyday life – getting your scalp massaged at the hairdresser, for instance, or owning one really nicely designed pair of trousers. She’s likewise good at life’s routine humiliations and inanities, such as bumping into your ex with a leaky bottle of coconut water in your handbag, or asking a favour from someone whose text messages you have been ignoring, or realising how much it’s going to cost to take an Uber back from Ikea.
The engine of the plot is a parasocial relationship but an old-fashioned one: Sophie becomes obsessed with a famous writer. (The writer is just “the author” for the first part of the book but then, perhaps finding the conceit unwieldy, Mason gives her a name, Lilac Dunne.) Sophie rereads her books, talks to an imaginary version of Lilac, and spends hours scrolling images of her and listening to her on podcasts. Then fantasy and reality collide when, to Sophie’s terror, Lilac is booked to appear after Elizabeth Strout drops out of an event.
An infatuation with the idea of Lilac, with her public persona and her authorial voice, is complicated by a first glancing and then apparently deepening encounter with the real thing. Lilac takes Sophie up, a little, and Sophie is flattered and flustered. She thinks of herself as a nobody but Lilac seems not to. And then … well, no spoilers.
If there’s a fault to be identified in this continuously witty and touching narrative, it’s in the person of Lilac. As a writer she appears to be unstuffy, poised, wise and at ease in the world; Sophie isn’t the only one to fall for her. When we encounter Lilac in person, she’s harder and more ruthless than her public persona but no less impenetrable, with none of the psychological complexity or vulnerability displayed elsewhere. She’s more deus ex machina in Sophie’s story than fully realised character.
But perhaps that’s by design. In this Bridget-Jones-meets-Pirandello caper, Mason is nothing if not knowing. As she writes in one of the closing chapters, opening a little postmodern mise en abyme: “If someone wrote a novel about Sophie, which they wouldn’t, but if they did, it could end there.” It doesn’t.
