Critique du Publishers Weekly
English writer Mason excels in her heartbreaking U.S. debut, an account of a woman's self-discovery amid her struggle with mental illness. Martha Russell was raised by volatile artists and as a teenager began to be affected by debilitating bouts of depression, for which she's prescribed an antidepressant. Told by a physician that it would be disastrous to get pregnant while on her medication, Martha spends the her adulthood telling her romantic partners--and trying to convince herself--that she doesn't want to be a mother. Martha's mental health ("Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed," she narrates) ends her first marriage and jeopardizes the second, to longtime family friend Patrick. After Martha is finally prescribed an effective medication, she's able to see her family relationships in new light--but is it too late to repair them? Martha's anecdotes, simultaneously funny and sad, are stacked with observations that alternate between brutally cutting--especially when directed at her mother and at the patient and supportive Patrick--and aching, as when her oblique descriptions of her sister's growing family increasingly belie her true feelings about motherhood. Witty and stark, Martha's emotionally affecting story will delight fans of Sally Rooney. (Feb.)
Critique du Guardian
In her poem "Tango", 2020's Nobel laureate Louise Glück concludes that "Of two sisters, one is always the watcher, one the dancer". It is a pattern familiar from life and from literature. In fiction it is usually the watching sister who takes on the role of the storyteller. In Sorrow and Bliss, New Zealander Meg Mason's first novel to be published in the UK, it falls to the dancer to tell her story as she sees it, even as she dances closer and closer towards the abyss. Martha Friel is 40, the writer of a "funny food column" that, once her editor has cut out all the jokes, is - as she sardonically acknowledges - just a food column. She has few friends, but is intensely close to her sister Ingrid. Her husband Patrick adores her. It is clear from the start, though, that Martha does not make things easy. Recalling a party not long after their wedding, she remembers Patrick suggesting that, instead of staring at a woman standing by herself and feeling sad on her behalf, she should go over and compliment her on her hat. "Even if I don't like it?" she asks him. "Obviously, Martha," Patrick replies. "You don't like anything." Like so much in this gloriously tender and absorbing novel, Patrick's remark manages to be both technically true and hopelessly wide of the mark. Patrick has loved Martha most of his life. Eight years and several pages later, he leaves her. Martha is clever, compassionate, hilarious, fierce and devastatingly sharp-eyed. She is also sharp-tongued, cruel, careless and prone to bursts of white-hot rage that range over the people closest to her like searchlights, mercilessly picking out their failings. That she hurts the people who love her best is something that causes her great anguish. It is also something she cannot seem to stop. Despite all this, people forgive Martha - until, like Patrick, they can't do it any more. Her family sticks by her, Ingrid most of all. They understand she is not well, that ever since "a little bomb went off in my brain" at the age of 17, she has been crushed by a recurring depression that leaves her, for days, weeks or months at a time, exhausted, terrified and unable to function. During these episodes, it is not, she says, that she wants to die. "It is that you know that you are not supposed to be alive ¿ The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix." She sees doctor after doctor, accumulating diagnoses and pills, but none of it makes any difference. In the end, defeated by the process, she reaches her own diagnosis: "I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people." If this makes the novel sound grim or self-absorbed, nothing could be further from the truth. Sorrow and Bliss has been justly compared to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag: both perform that peculiar miracle of making us care deeply, desperately even, for a character who does unforgivable things. It is also very funny. Like Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows, another masterclass in the fierce, exasperating, overwhelming force of sisterly love, it finds humour in the darkest of situations. It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud. Mason is brilliant on family, its eye-rolling absurdities and its deep hurts. Martha's drunken, bohemian mother is a sculptor who ignores her husband and her two daughters; when the girls were young, she would throw parties where she could be extraordinary in front of extraordinary strangers, because it was "not enough to be extraordinary to the three of us". Her kind, self-effacing father is a failed poet "whose desire to help me had always exceeded his ability". At its heart, though, this is a love story, or rather two love stories: the story of Martha's marriage to the quietly steadfast Patrick, a man who is broken in his own way, and the older, deeper story of Martha and Ingrid, whose illimitable love for one another turns out to have limits after all. Mason is careful not to pigeonhole Martha by naming her particular condition (when it is finally diagnosed, it is referred to only as "--"), but she makes us see how mental illness carves its shapes not just into the people who live with it but into their families. It scars them all. Mason pulls off something extraordinary in this huge-hearted novel, alchemising an unbearable anguish into something tender and hilarious and redemptive and wise, without ever undermining its gravity or diminishing its pain. In the end, Sorrow and Bliss is a coming-of-age story, if you can come of age at 40. It is by telling her story that Martha begins to understand the truths that can save her, and to work her way back towards herself. Sometimes, it seems, the dancer is the watcher too.
Critique de Booklist
Martha hasn't had an easy time with love, or with much of anything, really: a nebulous career, a failed "starter" marriage, and a long history of depressive moods that seem to be getting worse instead of better. Now in a second marriage, to Patrick, a friend of her cousin's that had orbited Martha's life since she was a teenager, she's convinced that with her husband's support, she can make it through her darkest days. Until those days become weeks, causing her to lash out and create a rift in her marriage she's certain can't be fixed. Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt. Much like the narrator of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Martha's voice is acerbic, witty, and raw. Sydney-based author Mason (You Be Mother, 2017) plots Martha's story in a nonlinear fashion, largely working backwards to highlight the highest and lowest points of her life. By refraining from naming Martha's ultimate diagnosis, referring to it only as "--", Mason trusts the reader to imagine the full weight of it. Fans of Marian Keyes should put this on their to-read lists.