What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

Overview

A heartfelt exploration of faith and love and friendship, What Happened To Sophie Wilder is a beautiful, absorbing work about the redemptive power of storytelling: a literary love story.

Charlie Blakeman has just published his first novel, to almost no acclaim. He's living on New York's Washington Square, struggling with his follow-up, and floundering within his pseudointellectual coterie when his college love, Sophie Wilder, returns to his life. Sophie is also struggling, though Charlie isn't sure why, since they've barely spoke, after falling out a decade before. Now Sophie begins to tell Charlie the story of her life since then, particularly the story of the days she spent taking care of a dying man with his own terrible past and of the difficult decision he forced her to make. When she disappears once again, Charlie sets out to discover what happened to Sophie Wilder. Christopher Beha's debut novel explores faith, love, friendship, and, ultimately, the redemptive power of storytelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935639312
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	05/29/2012
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Christopher Beha is the editor of Harper’s Magazine. He is the author of two previous novels, What Happened to Sophie Wilder and Arts & Entertainments, and a memoir, The Whole Five Feet. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. He lives in New York City with his wife and family.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] beautiful, whip-smart first novel…Beha…is a precise, attentive and unshowy novelist. There are no symphonic sentences to quote in this review because his novel is constructed out of lines simple and functional as fence posts. Its power accrues over pages, as Charlie's fate intersects with Sophie's and Bill's. Beha announces the book's stylistic and emotional mission early on, when Sophie delivers a rant about the Beat writers. "There's no control, no sense of form," she complains. "Eventually it all turns sentimental, like a conversation with a sloppy drunk." Her critical opinion of the Beats is debatable, but What Happened to Sophie Wilder is the kind of novel she'd admire: sober, unsentimental and delivered with intelligence and passion.
—Mark Athitakis

The Washington Post

Beha’s debut novel (after the memoir The Whole Five Feet) is a thoughtful journey about the place of intellectual curiosity in relation to faith, friendship, and love. Charlie Blakeman is enamored of Sophie Wilder, fellow creative writing M.F.A. student. They spend hours talking, writing, and reading before Sophie decides she needs a break and disappears, for days or sometimes weeks, but always returning. Then, a betrayal causes a longer breach. Both Charlie and Sophie publish novels, but only Sophie’s is acclaimed. Struggles with their second books push Sophie toward Catholicism. When she drops back into Charlie’s life, he wants to pick up the pieces, whereas she has a hidden agenda. It’s difficult to empathize with Sophie, even when she’s trying to do the right thing, because she’s so blatantly indifferent to the harm she causes. The stories she tells are manipulated to make them better, and readers also see Sophie through the stories Charlie tells, raising the potent question: where does the real Sophie end and Charlie’s interpretation of her begin? Beha is smart enough to let the reader decide. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company. (June)

Publishers Weekly

[Beha's] first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, is about many things—the New York publishing world, the growing pains of post-collegiate life, the rigors of Roman Catholicism—but at its center it's a moving meditation on why and for whom we write.
—Sarah Towers

The New York Times Book Review