Sympathy

February 6, 2017
Sudjic’s engrossing debut novel explores how technology dissolves personal boundaries while stripping away true intimacy. Alice travels from London to New York to stay with her sick grandmother during the spring of 2014. Even before she meets Mizuko, a writer who teaches creative writing at Columbia, Alice is obsessed with her. When circumstances align—nudged as far as possible by Alice for the two of them to meet—Alice is desperate for the kind of closeness she’s always imagined could be possible between her and the lauded writer. Physical, emotional, and digital boundaries are tested and broken as Alice struggles to replicate her close connection with Mizuko’s social media persona in her organic relationship with the real Mizuko. Whether that will happen rests on Mizuko’s ever-changing whims, but she simultaneously wields her technological abilities over Mizuko, who is transfixed by social media. Will the flesh-and-blood reality ever fall in line with Alice’s Instagram-addled fantasy? Sudjic’s story is disjointed, alluring, disorienting, and provoking, touching on many contemporary concerns arising from the pervasiveness of social media. At many moments the character of Alice is rather too inscrutable, and Sudjic’s steady, reliable prose is not enough to anchor some of Alice’s more dramatic actions. While some readers will find the ending confusing and unsatisfying, none will be bored by this frenetic, timely story of digital fixation actualized.

February 1, 2017
A first-time novelist considers identity and obsession in the digital age.Alice Hare is no longer quite herself--not that she ever had much of a self to begin with. Having been abandoned by her father, she has no one but her mother, a woman who is possessive, secretive, and manipulative. As she tries to piece together her own history, Alice becomes fixated on the period of her life she and her parents spent in Japan. A baby at the time, she has no memories of this sojourn, so she's free to invent. Eventually, this attempt to fabricate an identity turns into an intense fascination with the author Mizuko Himura, whom Alice comes to know in real life after stalking her via social media. This would make a great premise for a thriller, but it's quite evident Sudjic has more literary ambitions. The result is a story that's hard to follow even though it moves at an incredibly slow pace. One difficulty is that it moves around in time, and disparate episodes don't build on each other so much as they expose how much the reader doesn't know. This might make stylistic sense for a novel about a young woman tortured by the lacunae in her own life, but it's dissatisfying and disorienting. For example, the novel begins with Alice being shut out by Mizuko, and then it shifts into a long stretch dominated by letters from Alice's paternal grandmother. We learn about Alice's gap year in Japan after she graduated from university, and her momentous first evening with Mizuko happens without any description of how and why Alice became infatuated with her. Another example: Alice makes passing mention of her "boyfriend at that time," which comes as a shock since this is not only the first we're hearing of a romantic entanglement of any kind in her life ever, but it's also the first hint that she's made any new relationships at all since her move from England to New York. It doesn't help that Alice's real-world connection to Mizuko relies on a preposterous series of coincidences. An intriguing premise delivered in turgid prose.

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December 1, 2016
In this study of relationships in the age of the Internet, Alice Hare leaves England for New York, where she becomes completely obsessed with Japanese writer Mizuko Himura, whom she calls her "Internet twin." First novelist Sudjic won writing awards at Cambridge, but the reason to read this novel is the luscious, absorbing writing.

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