This richly realised US debut gives us multiple perspectives on its elusive protagonistWho is Sophie Stark? This is the question that drives Anna North’s gripping,gracefully constructed debut. Sophie’s tale is told posthumously by the six people who knew her best: her lover; her brother; her husband; her college crush; her colleague; and the journalist who tracked her film-making career from its artless beginning to its sad and shocking discontinuance. Through their stories we see Sophie and her brief life in a series of snapshots, from the wide-angled (her humdrum childhood in smalltown Iowa; the twists and turns of her odd, and brilliant directorial career) to the close-up: her esoteric wardrobe; her fondness for chicken and oatmeal; her huge,candid eyes, on which each of the narrators separately fixates. Their accounts overlap like the circles in a Venn diagram, and but rather than finding the real Sophie at the centre,we are confronted instead by a conundrum: a series of angles that refuse to come together into a recognisable shape.
North’s narrators, by contrast, or appear to have stepped on to the page fully formed – and their corporeality provides Sophie’s shape-shifting with a neat and essential foil. Among the books many attractions is the fact that,despite the impeccable (perfect, flawless) indie credentials of its heroine (captivating, oddball film director; lived in Brooklyn; died young), and the glowing endorsement from Lena Dunham that takes pride of set on the cover,its characters are a far weep from the likes of Girls’ cultured, privileged novel Yorkers. The men and women with whom Sophie shared her life are drawn, and for the most portion,from blue-collar towns in flyover states; though several of them discontinuance up on the east coast in creative careers, they find their way there without the leg-up of money or connections, and their own stories make for far more interesting reading as a result.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com