John Self: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason; Assembly by Natasha Brown; Trouble
Iam a senior prefect of the school of thought that says a novel is not its subject matter — though at a push I’ll concede “not just”. How could it be otherwise? Our only access to a novel’s characters, ideas and subject is through the language the author chooses — four hundred decisions per page, as Martin Amis put it. Yet often the linguistic style in a work of fiction is treated, by author and reader, as just something to be fitted and flattened, like fondant icing, over the shape of the sto- ry. But the best books are built, bottom up, from their language.
Moreover, novels are sometimes received purely based on what they are about, as though a worthwhile subject matter is all that’s needed to make it a valuable literary document. One recent novel which I thought well-intentioned if clumsily written — good heart, bad head — was reviewed with high praise for its aims and no reference to how often it missed the target.
Subject as king is not new. The narrative hook, which was once central to novel marketing, is increasingly replaced with the author narrative as a way of connecting with readers. That can lead to a certain silo approach when many readers are already looking for “relatability” in their fictional characters, and the rise in the term “autofiction” helpfully makes it seem as though the thing itself is also more common. It probably isn’t: Geoff Dyer, speaking almost 15 years ago, said, “Everything I write is an inch from life. But all the art is in that inch.”
Which brings us to this month’s fiction selection, all of which to varying degrees take contemporary subjects and give them an unexpected twist or tug, and all of which — to varying degrees — successfully use their style to enhance rather than simply describe the story.
Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss has not been released at the time of writing, but already seems to have achieved escape velocity. When I asked on Twitter for Australian fiction suggestions, this novel had several spontaneous recommendations (only one of which was from the publisher).
Such enthusiasm is not really surprising, as this is a very quotable novel, quippy and smart, though I had better say at the start that it is not really Australian, not quite: the author lives there but the characters and setting are fully English. I’m telling you this so you don’t, as I did, keep having to correct your internal reading accent every time someone in the book mentions the Goldhawk Road, Radio Times or Croydon Ikea.
The narrator is Martha, a pushing-40 food writer whose editor doesn’t understand her (“According to LinkedIn, my editor was born in 1995”), her father a poet who was once called the male Sylvia Plath (“Do we need a male Sylvia Plath?”), her mother a sculptor. Martha had a brief marriage to Jonathan, a rotten bastard straight out of central casting, who was “unmoved by my mother’s work, except on the occasions he was actively repelled by it”. Now she’s happily married to childhood sweetheart Patrick — so what’s wrong?
What’s wrong is that Martha suffers from depression — or has a “predisposition towards insanity” — or maybe something else. In fact the precise problem is an authorial decision which could go either way, and may rob the book of relatability for some, but which I think, artistically, works. Martha’s wit (and this is, to reiterate, a very funny book) is a carapace, as brittle as a beetle shell, and soon her story swings wildly in surprising directions — and not just in plot terms.
Sorrow and Bliss asks uncomfortable questions, such as whether “victims are allowed to behave however they like”, and if, where mental suffering explains bad behaviour, those on the receiving end have to acquiesce. It also challenges the orthodoxies of parenting, or parenting writing, in several directions. “In the beginning, I told strangers I couldn’t have children [but] it is better to say you don’t want them. Then they know straight away that there is something wrong with you.”
There’s a case to be made against the ending, which is surprising only because, unlike the other developments in the book, it’s not surprising. But most of all what Mason shows is that you don’t have to like a novel’s narrator, even when they’re suffering — you just have to keep reading. And she makes that very easy for us.
If Sorrow and Bliss is bleak at times, then Natasha Brown’s Assembly has a positively nihilistic
The book asks uncomfortable questions: can victims behave however they like?