I sometimes say that My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical novel from 1956 – saved my life. My mother pressed her dog-eared copy into my hands during a year I was hospitalised repeatedly for major depression.
The sun-soaked Greek island of Corfu – as well as the Durrell family’s foibles and adventures – felt a world away from my hometown’s bleak winter and all those blister packets and doctors’ waiting rooms. I became fascinated by Durrell’s colourful childhood and his longstanding career as both an author and a naturalist. I could easily recall the story’s funniest moments and parrot the most memorable lines.
On even the hardest days, it somehow seemed to help.
This may seem like a roundabout way of introducing Sophie, Standing There, the new novel by New Zealand–born, Sydney-based Meg Mason, which centres on a soon-to-be-divorced festival worker and her fixation on an author whose work begins to speak to her. But this story, too, is about what books and authors can mean to us at particular times, and how they might save us – sometimes not only in their what but also in their when.
Mason is known, and adored by many, for Sorrow and Bliss, her second novel. It achieved breakout success in 2020 and became an international bestseller. Undeniably dark but famously funny, Sorrow and Bliss also traces the breakdown of a marriage and examines a woman at her saddest. The novel won Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2022 and was shortlisted for several other prizes, including the Women’s Prize.
Described by many (me included) as a near-perfect book, it’s a tough act to follow. Yet Sophie, Standing There, a different sort of book, deserves to be appraised on its own merits.
In the opening pages, Sophie, a freelance sound technician in an unnamed Australian city, is reeling in the aftermath of her recent separation, when some idle work chitchat reignites her interest in a prolific novelist.
Even though it demands a trip to the boxes mouldering in her ex-husband’s garage, Sophie rereads all the novelist’s books and listens to every interview and podcast she can find. The author’s voice – her maxims and quotable quotes – help block out the real world, like a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.
It’s the author – or Sophie’s idea of the author – who softens spiky moments and resolves crises of confidence. It’s the author who shares in Sophie’s dreams and private jokes.
It’s not a literary crush, though, Sophie insists. It’s not a parasocial relationship. It’s love. Obsessive, all-consuming love. The kind that’s purest when sequestered by the imagination.
Fantasy collides with reality, however, when the author is invited to stand in for Elizabeth Strout, who’s contracted COVID, at an upcoming festival. Improbably, a wardrobe malfunction leads to a brief but extraordinary entanglement that lays bare some of the complex dynamics that can develop not only between authors and their readers, but between women more generally: friends, sisters, colleagues.
The pacing in the first act of the novel is noticeably ponderous, a study of minutiae and meandering moments. Everything from tap water and falafel to the public library feels deadened and unsatisfying – mired by Sophie’s grief in the long shadow of her failed marriage. Sophie has no energy, no appetite. She’s financially compromised, renting a dank, poky flat that belongs to her ex.
Readers familiar with Sorrow and Bliss’s sharp, sardonic Martha, rendered in first person, may feel more distanced from third-person Sophie – a character likewise adrift, but much blurrier around the edges.
Sophie describes herself as “moderately beautiful”, a devout lover of books and reading, but someone always standing by. “Perhaps if she had one talent,” Sophie reflects in the opening chapter, “it would be noticing small things that the others didn’t.” This is Sophie in a nutshell: attentive but rarely seen, rarely acknowledged in a way that feels authentic or reciprocal.
As the story gathers momentum, what becomes clear – once again – is Mason’s enduring gift for writing women characters submerged in crises they often have neither the language nor the tools to dismantle. With her characteristically deft touch, Mason palpates the tender spots that linger in the wake of divorce, infertility, long-term job insecurity and even the wounds religion may inflict.