A portrait of the artist as a young woman on the road to happiness

Everyone wants to be happy, but what serious reader wants to read about happiness? French author Henry de Montherlant said that “happiness writes in white ink on a white page.” It can’t be captured; not with dignity, anyway. Happy art so often equals kitsch. Poet Edward

Hirsch, in response to Montherlant’s edict, once wrote: “I don’t believe that only sorrow/and misery can be written.”

Novelist Lily King must be in Hirsch’s camp. Her new book, “Writers & Lovers,” set in 1997, begins in mourning and frustration, but it more or less persuasively opens out to genuine, even giddy, hope.

Its narrator, Casey Peabody, is a 31-year-old who bikes 3 miles to and from work as a waitress in Harvard Square. She lives in a small room — a former potting shed that still smells like “loam and rotting leaves” — attached to the garage of a friend of her brother’s. In opening lines that are both breezy and potent, Casey says: “I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. I’m like a teenager trying not to think about sex. But I’m also trying not to think about sex.”

So, problems with cash flow and love life. The two other most salient facts about Casey, she soon reveals, are that she is an aspiring writer and that her mother has recently died. Years earlier, including time spent in an MFA program, Casey had a cohort of wannabe writer friends, but they’ve all abandoned the craft, except for one woman who has been “working on a novel set during World War II for as long as I’ve known her.”

Casey hasn’t told her co-workers at the restaurant about her loss. “I don’t want to be the girl whose mother just died,” she says. Referring to herself as a girl might simply be King’s nod to her character’s insecurity, but it also reflects the fact that Casey sometimes reads much younger than even an unsettled 31.

Her mother died suddenly during a trip to Chile with friends. Her father, who pressured Casey when younger to pursue a promising career in golf, once lost a teaching and coaching job because he was peeping into the girls’ locker room along with some male students. The one time we see him reappear in Casey’s life, he acts the part of a two-dimensional villain.

In a delightful, very brief section on famous writers’ relationships to their dead mothers,

Casey tells us that when Edith Wharton’s mother, who had discouraged her daughter’s writing (and even reading), died, Wharton “sent her husband to the funeral. She stayed home to write.” Men are included in that section (Proust, D.H. Lawrence), but that Wharton tidbit chimes loudest with King’s project here.

On her bike, Casey passes a woman running, “sweatshirt hood up, fists clenched. We catch eyes just before she passes. Help, we seem to be saying to each other.” King’s novel is help of a sort, an unmistakable broadside against fiction’s love affair with macho strivers, even — or especially — when layers of lyricism and tenderness coat their machismo.

One might guess this new novel was deeply autobiographical even if King hadn’t said as much. Her own mother died unexpectedly not long after “Euphoria” was published, and this was her third attempt at a novel since then.