Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic

         Editors often give writers the advice to “kill your darlings”, meaning that all excess, no matter how much you like it, should be cut from the final version of the book. Privately, I’ve also always thought of it as being unsparing in your treatment of characters. You might love your characters, so you don’t want them to experience pain, but for the sake of the story, your characters need to experience conflict and suffer. Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic has a lot of positives, but stops short of sticking the landing, taking an otherwise very good book and ending on a “mid” note.

The premise of Sympathy is actually really compelling. Alice, an adopted Black girl with an absentee adoptive father, gets obsessed with a woman via social media: Mizuko Himuro, a woman about ten years her senior who is a successful writer and instructor at Columbia University. It’s one of those books where the characters are all frustrating and unlikable, though compelling. Alice is largely irredeemable, but Mizuko is also flawed, thoughtless, and self-serving with a kink for other peoples’ tears.

To focus on Alice first, she is far more outwardly egregious in her behaviour. She has some wonderful moments, like when she recounts a tutor that she loved and how the tutor told her “to ‘go have fun, go wild,’ and [she’d] burst out crying” (37). At the same time, she moves into her grandmother’s house and is meant to take care of her but is essentially useless. Meanwhile, she infiltrates Mizuko’s life, engineering situations for them to meet and spend time together. One night, Alice spends the evening with Mizuko while Mizuko is in conflict with her boyfriend, Rupert. Alice, also in a relationship, manipulates the situation to put distance between Mizuko and Rupert to insert herself and make Mizuko reliant on her. As she latches on, she is able to share a charged kiss with Mizuko and then share her bed—a high that she continues to strive for afterward. Meanwhile, she snoops through Mizuko’s phone, finding nude photographs and videos of her and Rupert and other partners, to which she self-satisfies. She lies about her intentions and lies about her life to keep Mizuko around, perpetually omitting the fact that she has stalked Mizuko on social media for ages.

The obsessiveness of the book is pretty compelling and there are a ton of wonderful features in the text. There are lots of great parallels and patterns. The motif of opposite atoms and the Higgs Boson speaks to Alice’s obsession. The aftereffects of a Japanese tsunami feature prominently, especially the detritus that remains afterward. The themes are developed with a great deal of clarity. 

One of the other layers to the text is the disruption of time. It’s a little bit difficult to follow the timeline of events; there were times that I was unclear which happens first, who is dating who when, and so forth. Alice reflects on this disruption to time a few times throughout the text. Mizuko writes a story about visiting Japan with her grandmother after the flood, which she also video recorded in full: “Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road” (217). Alice is that dark force from the future rewriting Mizuko’s history, which also makes sense given what happens to Mizuko a little later on…

Towards the end of the book, Alice becomes increasingly disassociated from herself. She describes writing as follows: “Writing in short bursts usually made me feel ordered and together, as if I had just taken a shower. If I did it for too long, it started to feel like I was having a nightmare. I would start to feel like it wasn’t even me writing it, like watching someone access your desktop remotely, or the drawing of the hands that are drawing each other” (405). Sudjic uses tech-based similes to explore the idea of not feeling in control of your own reality, but Alice also reflects on the idea of how actual experience becomes derealized through technological intermediaries. The passage continues as follows:

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her affect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her (405). 

The notion that time becomes totally derailed through her experience of this real-unreal person is a compelling way to reconceptualize the core of the story (and also justify why I found the timeline so confusing). While Alice is derealized and while Mizuko is derealized, Alice still seems to demonstrate some insight into her own ethical slippage: “I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn’t see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place” (405). There’s a little echo of the earthquake and tsunami loom under the surface.

In the end, though, the book reads as a message to someone who might not even read it. The book opens with Alice “unfriending” Mizuko in a fraught moment of uncertainty and the ending of the book is somewhat about getting her back, or at least giving her back to herself: “The purpose is no longer just to possess Mizuko but to give back what I took from her. The law of opposites says don’t send a message to your intended recipient if you want her to read it. So I am making it public. This rule has also been at work on me while writing. At first I thought I was writing to her, for her, about her. It is still all those things on the surface, but now it is deeper, wider” (405). It’s an effective closing statement for the book. 

For me, the book grows reasonably organically and builds its tension only to get derailed three quarters of the way through. Alice, through a series of bizarre coincidences, ends up going to stay in the Hamptons with Robin and Ingrid and various other friends and family. Robin and Ingrid are an older couple (60 and 40?). After doing a DNA test, Alice learns that Robin is Mizuko’s biological father, who she has never known. But, because Alice is a weird creep, she keeps the knowledge to herself. Incidentally, one day she takes a nap by the pool and awakes to find Robin touching her between her legs and they never address that ever again. Meanwhile, Alice’s boyfriend Dwight is a tech developer and works on an app called TriMe, which is a Tinder-like app designed for people seeking threesomes. At one point, Alice brings Mizuko to a masquerade play with Robin and Ingrid. Following the play, they go to dinner. In the washroom, Mizuko shows Alice that she has just matched with Robin and Ingrid on the TriMe app. Remember: Robin is Mizuko’s father. From there, Mizuko and Alice get separated. Alice ends up on drugs at an orgy where she is aggressively raped while she’s insensible (and consequently loses a fetus she had intended to abort the following day). It’s a bit excessive there. You might be thinking: Jeff, you told us people should be harsher to their characters. Well, here’s what happens next.

Alice gets increasingly obsessed about Mizuko, trying to track her down. Fearing she’s been ghosted, Alice sends increasingly desperate texts: WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU I NEED YOU and so on. Then, Alice goes on an ADHD med bender and gets hyper-focused, writing a lengthy confession letter to Mizuko. She explains all the ways she infiltrated Mizuko’s life, the betrayals she has hidden, and the secret she has kept about Mizuko’s parentage. The whole letter is a scorched earth letter and the tension is high for when Mizuko receives it. After not hearing from Mizuko for some time, it turns out that she had a brain parasite that made her have a public seizure and then she needed surgery. Alice arrives at Mizuko’s apartment and has found the letter has been opened (!) by Mizuko’s estranged mother, who has come to nurse her back to health.

At this point, I had two different endings in mind that I thought would be excellent extensions of the tension. In my first idea, Mizuko’s mother is primed to expose Alice. I could easily see it being a direct conflict or something more like blackmailing her out of Mizuko’s life. That doesn’t happen. Instead, Alice catches a break where, following her surgery, Mizuko is essentially “soft reset” and does not remember anything (time collapses inward again). Alice once again is able to nurse her back to health and keep her isolated from the world. She prevents her from contacting her ex, using her cell phone, or any other contact with the outside world. Alice encourages Mizuko to write a book in isolation. The second ending I had in mind is that, knowing that Mizuko is self-serving, it would have been excellent to see that Mizuko is the one that has actually engineered the situation to see how far Alice would go and to write a book about her. How desperate is this younger woman to care for her Misery-style? How pathetic is she? Instead of Alice being the one manipulating Mizuko, having a reversal at the end would have been a beautiful touch.

But none of that happens.

Instead, after thirty days in isolation, Mizuko’s ex shows up at the door. He bangs on the door and Mizuko wants to see him, but has to get ready first. Alice then sneaks out the window and runs away. She keeps pausing, hoping that Mizuko will follow her, but she never does. So instead Alice runs away, finds that her grandmother has died (she was supposed to take care of her), and then goes back to England and cries to her no-longer-estranged mother, starting a gardening business and then still creeping a now no-longer-available online Mizuko. It just felt that there were so many opportunities for the conflict to come to a boil but we missed every one.

We do get a revelation at the end that adds a dark twist to the book. As it turns out, Alice found out that Mizuko’s estranged mother had left a letter. Himuro reveals that she had never wanted Mizuko because she was a child produced by rape. Himuro gives the story of how Robin raped her in university, how she got pregnant, and never wanted to find him again because she was never believed and he claimed it was consentual. After writing the letter, Himuro walked into the river and drowned herself, leaving also Mizuko’s grandmother to care for herself (and die alone and unfound for some time back in Japan). It’s unclear whether Mizuko knows this information. So, there is another turn at the end but the central conflict is not the one that is most effectively developed.

One other thing that I liked about the book is the characterization of New York. Alice moves to New York from the UK to be with her grandmother and Sudjic gives a great description of walking in New York:

You don’t have to have any idea where you are going; you can advance without being aware of anything but the vague progress into time stretching out before you. In this way I discovered moments of light-headedness, which led to a feeling that my body was somehow becoming less and less material. The exact opposite of what had happened to me at home in England, when everything had become gloopy and masklike. I felt, after a time, like I could float upwards, into the air, as well as down. At its most intense, I felt like I was only a heartbeat inside my brain.
You can also cope better with strange things when you are slightly tripping out like this. It is certainly easier to fall in love with a stranger. You can answer the question “How you doing today, senorita?” in a way you never would in England, if you were asked, which you wouldn’t be. You can get talking to a woman who is wearing a smart grey suit but sitting on the sidewalk, begging. There will likely be a snappy dachshund parked beside her in a pram when you realise you have no coins in your purse, only dollar bills. This will not embarrass you; you’ll just give the bills.

You can wonder with detached amusement what a Philly cheese steak is and make your mistaken judgment based on the smell of spicy sausage in the air, which in fact comes from an adjacent cart you should have gone to instead. People will make comments about how slowly you count the change. Doesn’t matter. It’s novelty. It might as well be another language. You can pass a man holding something strange and highly personal in the street and look away because it feels like he is doing it on purpose to make people look. You can sit in a cafe downtown whilst a family holds in prayer and gives thanks because somebody graduated today, and you can watch them unselfconsciously because they are so deep into it. On the Lower East Side, you can count the ornamental cockatoos within dusty windows. In midtown you can buy something for allergy season when you see a warning about it outside a juice shop. You can do whatever you like—you can go completely mental—and no one gives a shit. (50-51)

I include that passage just as a taste of the flare in Sudjic’s novel. There are some details that really linger and standout, connected to a larger thematic framework. On the topic of New York, there’s a tense moment where Alice has to take her grandmother to the hospital but there’s confusion of where is where. In the cab, her grandmother gives the name of the hospital she is meant to go to, and Alice thought it was a different one. Her grandmother “sweating, eyes bulging” asks if that’s where she’s supposed to go. Alice narrates, “I thought Griffin wanted us to go to a different place—a hospital—but I didn’t know where it was, so I hoped I’d misremembered the address of the surgery the previous night and we were going to the hospital, because after a while the numbers and avenues all blurred into one. I hoped that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault for not intervening. I hadn’t because I didn’t want to be wrong. If I was wrong, I didn’t want to be culpable for what might happen to her as a result of wasting time” (145). This ambiguity and tension and her resistance to taking definitive action reads as so relatable but also raises the stakes for the scene.

I also appreciate how Sympathy is deeply rooted in reality but at the same time exists in unreality. In one part, Alice discusses a plastic storage box that used to house memorabilia of her lost father, which she then fills with artefacts of her time with Mizuko. She describes it as a “mini-museum” and the heaviest thing in it is Mizuko’s copy of The Golden Bowl. Alice describes how Mizulo “often said that novels were dead because we have the Internet everywhere we go now and we can find out anything we want to know straightaway, which tends to kill a plot. That was why she wrote just about real life. It feels true in some ways. In other ways, I reassured her, stories must be more like chess, a game of perfect information in which all the moves that can be made are right there in front of you, but the problem is knowing what your opponent knows and what she plans to do” (79). In that way, I appreciate that Sudjic is trying to write a novel that incorporates technology as a device while also retaining the uncertainty and dramatic tension at the core of human existence, especially when it comes to love and obsession.

Overall, I would say that Sudjic has a good book here. There was a lot to like and the thematic and psychological exploration in the book is really worth the experience. It’s only slightly marred by the fact that the ending falls flat after such a build-up. If only the climax paid off more powerfully, I think the book would be one of the best I’d read this year—and yes, I leave the verb tense ambiguity in place intentionally.

Happy reading!