Beha’s wonderstruck writer of a
main character, Charlie Blakeman, lost track of Sophie Wilder after they spent
their college days in a turbulent relationship fueled by their mutual passion
for writing, though he never stopped thinking about her. A serendipitous run-in
with Sophie years later baffles him. The once impulsive, wild and free artist
is now a devout Catholic, an ex-wife, and an ex-writer.
Sophie disappears from
Charlie’s life as soon as she reappears, making her all the more attractive to
him, and giving him all the more reason to find her.
As
the New York Times points
out in their book review, which was mostly positive, Charlie sums up his
feelings about Sophie’s character when he describes her swimming in a pool in
Connecticut:
“She moved quickly through the
pool, though from where I was watching she appeared to do nothing to propel
herself, like a bird that stays perfectly still while cutting through the sky.
She seemed not so much a body as a shimmering trick of water and light.”
It’s always dangerous to write
about a writer; especially since one of the easiest cop-outs for making a first
person narrator super duper poetic is by making him or her a poet—surprise.
But the reviews from the New York Times and
the San Francisco Chronicle seem
to reinforce the idea that Beha’s book isn’t gimmicky. There might even be an
intentional meta-writing element in this novel; a writer, Beha, is writing
about a writer, Charlie, who seems to be writing about the woman he thinks he
might love. What does it all mean?
Perhaps, like Charlie, we have
as much control in the present moment as fictional characters do in a novel,
which is very little, (Like Stranger
than Fiction kind of). Or maybe it’s the exact opposite, and
like a novelist, we dictate how our stories end. It’s impossible to say for sure without actually knowing what happened to Sophie Wilder.
-Dominick Sorrentino
Intern
