I sometimes say that My Family and Other Animals \u2013 Gerald Durrell\u2019s autobiographical novel from 1956 \u2013 saved my life. My mother pressed her dog-eared copy into my hands during a year I was hospitalised repeatedly for major depression.<\/p>\n
The sun-soaked Greek island of Corfu \u2013 as well as the Durrell family\u2019s foibles and adventures \u2013 felt a world away from my hometown\u2019s bleak winter and all those blister packets and doctors\u2019 waiting rooms. I became fascinated by Durrell\u2019s colourful childhood and his longstanding career as both an author and a naturalist. I could easily recall the story\u2019s funniest moments and parrot the most memorable lines.<\/p>\n
On even the hardest days, it somehow seemed to help.<\/p>\n
This may seem like a roundabout way of introducing Sophie, Standing There, the new novel by New Zealand\u2013born, 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 \u2013 sometimes not only in their what but also in their when.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Prize.<\/p>\n
Described by many (me included) as a near-perfect book, it\u2019s a tough act to follow. Yet Sophie, Standing There, a different sort of book, deserves to be appraised on its own merits.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Even though it demands a trip to the boxes mouldering in her ex-husband\u2019s garage, Sophie rereads all the novelist\u2019s books and listens to every interview and podcast she can find. The author\u2019s voice \u2013 her maxims and quotable quotes \u2013 help block out the real world, like a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the author \u2013 or Sophie\u2019s idea of the author \u2013 who softens spiky moments and resolves crises of confidence. It\u2019s the author who shares in Sophie\u2019s dreams and private jokes.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a literary crush, though, Sophie insists. It\u2019s not a parasocial relationship. It\u2019s love. Obsessive, all-consuming love. The kind that\u2019s purest when sequestered by the imagination.<\/p>\n
Fantasy collides with reality, however, when the author is invited to stand in for Elizabeth Strout, who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 mired by Sophie\u2019s grief in the long shadow of her failed marriage. Sophie has no energy, no appetite. She\u2019s financially compromised, renting a dank, poky flat that belongs to her ex.<\/p>\n
Readers familiar with Sorrow and Bliss\u2019s sharp, sardonic Martha, rendered in first person, may feel more distanced from third-person Sophie \u2013 a character likewise adrift, but much blurrier around the edges.<\/p>\n
Sophie describes herself as \u201cmoderately beautiful\u201d, a devout lover of books and reading, but someone always standing by. \u201cPerhaps if she had one talent,\u201d Sophie reflects in the opening chapter, \u201cit would be noticing small things that the others didn\u2019t.\u201d This is Sophie in a nutshell: attentive but rarely seen, rarely acknowledged in a way that feels authentic or reciprocal.<\/p>\n
As the story gathers momentum, what becomes clear \u2013 once again \u2013 is Mason\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n