Note: I received a copy of The Life and Death of Sophie Stark from the publisher, for review consideration.
Let’s get one thing cleared up off the bat: Sophie Stark is not the dreamy Game of Thrones redhead who keeps getting promised in marriage to psychopathic twerps. That is Sansa Stark, played in the show by Sophie Turner. But I can see how you would get confused. I have been confused about that myself. Moving on.
.gif)
Sophie Stark (nee Emily Buckley) makes films. From her earliest documentary short about a college athlete she’s obsessed with, she tells stories that don’t belong to her. What matters to Sophie is getting the film to match the vision in her head; she’s less concerned with the impact it might have on the people whose lives she’s playing with. Told from the perspectives of the various people whose lives cross paths with Sophie’s career, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark circles around the elusive artist, trying to find a way to understand her.
When you look back at the course of a relationship (I don’t just mean a romantic relationship, any kind really), at any moment of conflict, you lose your grip on who was at fault. Was the other person being unreasonable? Or were they trying their best, and you were just expecting the wrong thing of them? The answer is rarely clean and often “both.”
What worked spectacularly well for me in this book was the utter weirdness and unfathomability of Sophie Stark. North writes her as someone who simply lacks awareness of social contracts: Where her brother, her lovers, her colleagues might imagine an obligation exists, she remains calmly oblivious, doing exactly what she wants without apology or guilt. The narrators look back on their time with her and wonder if their expectations of her ever made any sense to begin with. Sophie has a knack for destabilizing other people’s certainty of social norms just by appearing not to know they are there.
If Sophie’s weirdness was brilliantly lifelike, her film-making fell flat for me. With the proviso that I don’t know film, very few of the details of the material logistics of making a film or the auteur process of it were specific and vivid enough to feel real. Ekphrasis is hard, but when another art form is central to the story, I want to be able to imagine what that art looks like and why people value it.