SORROW AND BLISS

Mason's bleakly comic debut examines with pitiless clarity the impact of the narrator's mental illness on her closest relationships.

British magazine columnist Martha Friel has just turned 40, and Patrick, her long-suffering husband of seven years, has left her. She moves from Oxford back to the London home of her parents: famous alcoholic sculptor Celia and kindly Fergus, whose signal achievement has been the publication of a single poem. Here she reflects on a life that began with a relatively normal, if unhappy, childhood and then took a sharp turn when she was 17 and “a little bomb went off in my brain,” leaving her subject to rage, depression, suicidal impulses, and decades of what she sees as one useless medication after another. Martha's world is almost entirely confined to Patrick, her parents, and her beloved sister, Ingrid, who is pregnant with her fourth child when the novel opens. What plot there is hinges on Martha's fraught relationship with Patrick as they both question the basis of their marriage and on her even more fraught relationship with herself as a new diagnosis leaves her bottoming out and more angry than ever. (Mason is careful not to specify what this new diagnosis is and, in an afterword, notes that Martha's mental illness doesn't correspond with any defined one.) While some readers may lose patience with Martha and her narrow world and will wonder why the author has chosen the structure of a romance to deal with Martha's difficulties, Mason brings the reader into a deep understanding of Martha's experience without either condescending to her or letting her off too easily. While we as readers have the luxury of finding her observations funnier than she does, we're not so far distanced from her that we can't appreciate both her strengths and her weaknesses.

An astute depiction of life on the psychic edge.