Christopher Beha's short but intricately constructed first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, tells the story of two young writers struggling to discover their personal and professional identities.
Sophie Wilder and Charlie Blakeman met in a college creative writing course," a period Beha revisits through flashbacks. Now, a decade later, Charlie has written a first novel whose critical reception is as disappointing as its sales, while Sophie has produced a dazzling story collection that holds the promise of a bright literary career.
For both of them, the way forward has turned murky at best. Charlie is producing no new writing, and Sophie's marriage to another classmate is foundering. Her life is further upended when the father her husband has claimed is long dead enters their lives, now truly dying of cancer. Sophie becomes his caregiver, a position that forces her to confront troubling ethical questions as the dying man makes it clear he wants her to hasten his end.
Beha writes with an absence of irony about Sophie's moral crisis and her gradual conversion to Catholicism, spurred by an encounter with a compassionate priest and her discovery of a convent near the home she inherited from her parents after they were killed in a car crash when she was a teenager.
On the surface, Charlie and Sophie have it all. At one point, Charlie says, "We had been given something beautiful, asked only to watch over it. We'd been careless, and now it was all in ruin." That rueful comment could well serve as the epitaph for the lives sketched in this challenging story. --Harvey Freedenberg