Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Published 2022 · 296 pages · 91,214 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Sorrow and Bliss to read?

Sorrow and Bliss scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
The novel employs a contemporary and generally accessible vocabulary, similar to 'The Great Gatsby' in its elegance without being obscure. While words like 'canapé,' 'furtively,' 'self-abnegation,' 'millefeuille,' and 'objective correlative' appear, they are either clarified by context or common enough not to impede comprehension significantly. The occasional literary or slightly formal term is balanced by direct, conversational language.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Mason frequently uses long sentences with multiple clauses, often connected by 'and' or commas, creating a flowing, stream-of-consciousness effect. The narrator's internal monologues and detailed descriptions can lead to sentences spanning several lines, demanding sustained attention from the reader. This complexity is higher than 'The Great Gatsby' but less extreme than the dense hypotaxis of Henry James or Faulkner.
Abstraction: 62 out of 100
While grounded in a concrete narrative of relationships and mental health, the novel frequently delves into philosophical musings and abstract emotional states. The narrator often generalizes her personal experiences into broader observations about life, marriage, and human nature, moving beyond simple storytelling to explore deeper meanings. This blend of the concrete and the abstract places it above pure social observation but below purely theoretical works.
Information density: 68 out of 100
The text is rich with internal monologue, detailed observations, and a rapid succession of anecdotes and reflections, requiring constant reader engagement. The narrative often jumps between past and present, and between external events and the narrator's complex psychological landscape, packing a significant amount of conceptual and emotional information into each page. This creates a demanding reading experience, akin to 'Lolita' in its rich texture but still navigable.
Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
Martha's first-person narration often directly expresses her internal state and observations, but her self-deprecating wit and contradictory actions require readers to infer deeper emotional truths. The narrative relies on readers piecing together the full impact of her mental health struggles and relationship dynamics from her subjective lens, rather than explicit exposition. This is more inferential than direct exposition, but less actively deceptive than a purely unreliable narrator like in 'Lolita'.
Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
The novel is rich with recurring motifs and objects that carry significant meaning beyond their literal presence, such as the 'sofa' representing Patrick's constant presence, the 'Executive Home' symbolizing alienation, and the 'rubber band' as a token of hidden love. The text often explicitly discusses the symbolic weight of these elements, as seen in Ingrid's 'slag heap' as an 'objective correlative', placing it closer to 'The Great Gatsby' in its use of integrated symbolism.
Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
Martha's narrative voice is consistently infused with dry, sardonic humor and self-critique, creating a noticeable gap between her surface observations and deeper emotional realities. Her witty descriptions of characters like Jonathan and her parents, alongside her own self-deprecating remarks, demand that the reader interpret the underlying sincerity or critique, similar to the nuanced perspective in 'The Great Gatsby'.
Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
The narrative deliberately resists a definitive resolution for Martha's mental health, portraying her depression as a cyclical, ongoing struggle that she and Patrick learn to manage rather than overcome. While their relationship finds a form of acceptance, the protagonist's core internal conflicts remain, explicitly stated as 'indistinct from any before it,' offering an open-ended emotional conclusion rather than a clear cure, similar to 'The Crying of Lot 49' in its lingering uncertainty.
Structural complexity: 75 out of 100
The novel employs a fragmented, non-linear structure, characterized by frequent, often unannounced, jumps between past and present events, separated by asterisks. This, combined with Martha's self-aware, sometimes unreliable narration and the inclusion of various lists and meta-commentary on narrative conventions, requires active reader engagement to reconstruct chronology and thematic connections, placing it beyond simple flashbacks and closer to the discontinuous fragments of 'Flights'.

How Sorrow and Bliss is regarded

Sorrow and Bliss holds a literary regard score of 35 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Sorrow and Bliss sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (154 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Sorrow and Bliss scores 70 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
Two people who have ruined each other's lives shouldn't get a second go at it.
Symbol: Formal
all I've been trying to do, all these years, is take rubbish and turn it into something beautiful and much stronger than it was before.
Mythos: Ironic Tragedy iv (tragic pathos) (irony iv)
we are together in, Patrick says, injury time – time we are not entitled to – and so we are grateful.
Genre: Confession + Novel
I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties.

Where the story of Sorrow and Bliss takes place

  • London, Oxford and Paris, 1993-2020 (Goldhawk Road, Belgravia, the Executive Home) (1993 to 2020), the main setting

5 things that are true of Sorrow and Bliss, with the passage for each

  1. Martha's wedding to Jonathan Strong cost £70,000 and all of it was paid for by him.

    MY WEDDING TO Jonathan cost £70,000. He paid for all of it.

  2. Patrick proposes while Martha is wearing Winsome's clothes, and he repeats the proposal after she says no.

    I told him we shouldn't see each other and he asked me to marry him.

  3. Martha's diagnosis is blanked out as '——' for the whole book and is never named.

    then said —— out loud to see what it felt like, applying that word to myself.

  4. Martha's mother, Celia, has been sober for 218 days when Martha finally learns it.

    it has been two hundred and eighteen days since my last drink.

  5. Martha's father becomes an Instagram poet with one million followers after fifty-one years of 'forthcoming' anthology.

    He is the Instagram poet, Fergus Russell. He has one million followers.

Scenes in Sorrow and Bliss that Frye would name

15 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Alazon, untitled
'I'm Jonathan Strong, but I'm much more interested in who you are.' Jonathan is the braggart-impostor who presents warmth and is exposed as cruel.
Anagnorisis, untitled
That I desperately wanted him back wasn't a revelation at all by the time I reached the last page. Martha reads her own journal and recognises why the marriage ended.
Agon, untitled
I went around the coffee table, grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and wrenched it The fight with Patrick is the violent conflict stage of the quest.
Confession, untitled
I sat down on the floor and wrote for a long time until I realised, turning over, that I had reached the last page. The narration is revealed as the gratitude journal, confirming the confessional frame.
Cognitio, untitled
'It was fucking awful.' The honest exchange in the corridor at EasyStore restores the couple's truth and brings the reconciliation.
Point of epiphany, untitled
On the highest floor of the Goldhawk Road house there is an iron balcony The rusted balcony is the high place where life and death touch.

Books that share these scenes with Sorrow and Bliss

About the author

Meg Mason