Writers & Lovers by Lily King

Casey Kasem’s life is a mess.  She’s living a precarious bohemian life in 1990s Boston.  In her early 30s, she’s supporting herself, and trying to pay off a mountain of student debt, by waitressing in an up-scale restaurant across the river in Cambridge.   The recent, unexpected death of her mother has had a devastating effect on her already fragile emotional equilibrium.  On top of all that, what has given her life shape and meaning, her writing, has stalled. 

Writers and Lovers is a very humourous novel.  

Just as well, given the above, and given, also, that first-person narrator, Casey, is not the most sympathetic of characters.  She is quite protective of her immaturity and has a curious passivity about her.   These annoying qualities are mitigated by our enjoyment of the comedic set-pieces that form the narrative structure of the story.  

In this, her fifth novel, Lily King is certainly obeying the adage “Write what you know”.  This, as might be obvious from the title, is a writer writing about writing and the literary world.  And, in a brief aside, I find this somewhat of a relief. Novelists, in wanting to feature the creative process, too often make their protagonists painters. As speaking as someone who had a career as a visual artist, rarely do they get it right.

Not only being on reassuringly firm footing in regards to the character’s profession, and in the familiarity with the setting of her home ground of New England, the author, it would appear, must have spent some considerable time waiting on tables.  The mise-en-scène and inter-personal dynamics in the restaurant segments have a nuanced feel of reality that speaks of much personal experience.

To query how much of the veracity brought of ‘Lovers’ side of the title is also down to personal experience, would be impolite.

There is the distant whiff of Bridget Jones’ Diary about this novel but in its satirizing of the literary world, what is a bit more resonant is Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth.  In that novel, the character, Franny, has relationship with older successful male author, who, I reckon, is a send up of Philip Roth.  Or someone very like him.

The other book that, curiously, comes to mind is the J K Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith, novel, The Silkworm.  Although written as a detective story, Rowling obviously is having a great deal of fun taking the mickey out the publishing world and certain writers.