Sophie, Standing there, the follow-up to Mason’s global bestseller, Sorrow and Bliss, is a tragicomic tour de force. The novel offers a defining portrait of loneliness, and its secret bedfellow – shame – in the digital age.
The protagonist, Sophie, works as a sound technician for a literary festival, hidden in the wings, invisible to the famous authors that she tentatively mics up. Mason takes full advantage of the setting to enjoy some gentle skewering of her contemporaries with author name-checks and cameos galore, including a heroic turn from David Nicholls.
Despair not. What appears at the beginning to be a lightly satirical account of the publishing world from an outsider’s perspective soon evolves in profound ways.
Recently separated from her husband, Sophie is lost in her own quiet life. Living a depressing existence in a grotty flat owned by her ex, she finds comfort in reading. When she rediscovers the back catalogue of a literary superstar, Sophie soon becomes obsessed with the author. The parasocial relationship intensifies as she listens to her podcasts on repeat, continuously re-reads her work and conducts imaginary conversations with her new great love. Inevitably, the two will have to meet or Mason would not be delivering on the novel’s promise; how things unfold, however, is surprising and yet utterly convincing.
Mason is excellent at illuminating the dark comedy inherent to life. Without ever chasing a big laugh, readers are invited to revel in the exquisite details of Sophie’s mortifying experiences to great comic effect. And yet, there is so much empathy for Sophie that it doesn’t feel like we are laughing at her, but experiencing it all with her.
Mason is also excellent at reality, at creating an authentic world where Ikea delivery charges are too expensive, friendships are complicated and pride in a perfect pair of trousers can be your undoing. At capturing the alienation of loneliness. A great literary stylist, there is nonetheless so much substance in Mason’s work. A moment of stunning pathos – a tea-towel doll named Happy Jenny – delivers a stunning blow.
This is a beguiling novel that shape-shifts to become something so much more than a sum of its meta-narrative parts. Towards the end of the novel, Mason writes, “If someone wrote a novel about Sophie, which they wouldn’t, but if they did, it could end there.” Mason does not end the novel there – this is an author in confident control of her craft.
Helen Cullen is the author of The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually and the forthcoming Iseult