Even with a handful of compelling plots in the air, King is at her wisest and most self-assured when she shows how Casey gradually gets her bearings as a motherless daughter: one step forward, two steps back. Losing a parent at any age is the pits, but being the first of your friends to go through it—to be the one writing a eulogy when everyone else is writing wedding vows—is its own fresh hell. Writers & Lovers bravely traverses that pain ... After a while, I didn’t bother to dog-ear anymore; I just held the book open and let my tears fall on the page. I’m not talking crying-emoji tears; I mean actual sobs, the most cathartic kind ... a story where absence is a constant presence, stitched with humor, determination and hope.
... wonderful, witty, heartfelt ... Writers & Lovers is a funny novel about grief ... it’s dangerously romantic, bold enough and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness ... This is a bracingly realistic vision of the economic hopelessness that so many young people are trapped in: serving extraordinary wealth but entirely separate from it ... the arc of this story [is] so enchanting. All of these tragedies and obstacles are drawn with stark realism and deep emotional resonance. But even during the early pages, we can sense Casey’s spirit crouching in determined resistance ... As in her previous novels, King explores the dimensions of mourning with aching honesty, but in Writers & Lovers she’s leavened that sorrow with an irreducible sense of humor ... With Casey, King has created an irresistible heroine—equally vulnerable and tenacious—and we’re immediately invested in her search for comfort, for love, for success ... The result is an absolute delight, the kind of happiness that sometimes slingshots out of despair with such force you can’t help but cheer, amazed.
King deftly crafts a young woman aching to reach a personal Nirvana ... Death permeates the book, it looms above every character’s outline, and King skillfully colors each of them in a different hue ... In Casey, King has created a woman on the cusp of personal fulfillment and strong enough to stand on her own, someone akin to Sally Rooney’s Frances in Conversations with Friends—both writers home in meticulously on female personal development mediated by capitalism, art, sexual relationships vs. romance, and friendship ... King’s novel is a defense of writing, sure; her character finds her voice in the end and brings her novel to completion, and finally sells it. But King aims for something higher than that. The novel is a meditation on trying itself: to stay alive, to love, to care. That point feels so fresh, so powerfully diametrically opposed to the readily available cynicism we’ve been feasting on
... oh my, it's a good read ... There's nothing exotic or startlingly new about this story, but Writers & Lovers is stellar proof that literature doesn't have to be groundbreaking to be absolutely compelling ... Not only does Casey's story capture how hard it can be to believe in yourself, stay the course, and just finish the damn book when all your friends are getting paychecks and promotions, marrying and having babies — but also, reassurance that you don't have to break the mold to write a great book. Of course, writing as beautifully as King does help ... Among the elements that make Writers & Lovers so winning are the perfectly calibrated little details, convincing conversations, and droll wit ... generously infused with heart and soul and wit and wisdom.
Yes, both of the love interests are writers, but this smooth, deliberate chronicle of creation keeps the men in their place and Casey firmly rooted at the center of her own story. Instead of casting her as a woman torn between archetypes of male creativity, Writers & Lovers portrays her as a woman in thrall to her own generative processes, a devotee to the art of (her own) attention ... This isn’t an exploration of what it means to be a writer; it’s an exploration of what it means to write. And King’s prose, simple, clear and accretive, mimics in form what she’s conveying — that art is an accumulation of details and that, in the IRL present, close attention is slipping away from us with every swipe of the screen ... What’s most refreshing is that after a spate of novels and memoirs that fix a female creator in reference to a great man, Casey emerges as a woman who builds her literary identity out of parts all her own ... while describing the intense effort of putting words in order, feels effortless, or at least like an unconscious natural process. King’s sentences are like layers of silt and pebbles condensed into sedimentary rock — distinct from one another but fitted into an indestructible whole. And she pulls off a considerable trick: she convinces us that the miracle of attention, that coveted capability we all imagine slipped from our grasps as the new millennium dawned, must still lie somewhere inside writers, even if their fingers are swiping as often as typing. After all, in the year 2020, she’s produced this, a classic bildungsroman for struggling artists everywhere.
... a puzzling and beautiful novel about writing and love. Its beauty lies in its precise observations ... What’s puzzling about the novel is how swiftly and intensely its quiet heroine captures your attention ... There’s a stomach-churning pathos to the paucity of her resources and a dogged naivety in her commitment to writing in such meagre circumstances. King makes her struggles feel monumental, grindingly bleak. Yet somehow, Casey takes hold with a vice-like grip on your heart. Reading the book feels like waiting for clouds to break—a kind of gorgeous agony ... But it’s funny, too. King leavens Casey’s misery with a wry, undaunted humour ... The romances are charming and believable. And King writes children with a palpable tenderness ... Most of all, King writes writers with a rare acuity ... it’s hard not to feel that King...is telling us the truest things she knows.
Certainly, the descriptions of Casey’s interminable shifts at a high-end restaurant on Harvard Square—the bewildering, relentless pressure, the catty staff politics, the vicious head chef—were so alarmingly immersive that I started having PTSD flashbacks to my waitressing days ... Novels about writing novels usually set pseud alarms ringing, but Writers & Lovers anchors itself in the mundane, the wry and the relatable. It’s just a shame that amid the ragged, all-too-real emotions King summons up so deftly, the plot resolution is so predictable and neat.
With wit and what reads like deep insider wisdom, King captures the chronic low-level panic of taking a leap into the artsy unknown and finding yourself adrift, without land in sight ... King pays Casey's exhausting daily labors as a server at that pricey Harvard Square restaurant the respect of particularity ... Writers & Lovers is a funny and compassionate novel about the cost of sticking with the same dream for what may be too long. It doesn't have the historical reach of King's last novel, the acclaimed Euphoria, about the life of the young Margaret Mead. But it shares with that novel a fascination with female ambition and with how especially difficult it is for a woman to define the worth of her life when the familiar markers of adult achievement are slow to materialize.
... the most well-defined characters in this thickly populated book [are Casey's two suitors]. The older, more established of them is especially finely drawn, a nuanced portrait of alternately endearing and repellent male neediness ... Unfortunately, unlike, for example, Sigrid Nunez’s writer-narrator in The Friend (2018), whose reflections are the sort that emerge from years of profound engagement with literature as both a reader and writer, Casey seems content with New Age pieties ... This is the language of self-help books and Goop ... there isn’t much insight on display, more a kind of sensitivity signalling. King’s narrator—or, rather, King herself—also makes some irritating mistakes ... None of this seriously detracts from Casey’s likeability as a character. But the arc of her follow-your-dream story, with its somehow not- surprising ending, does seem rather facile.
Lily King unwinds an insightful story ... Much of the success of this story lies with King’s wonderful writing style. Her vivid descriptions make even mundane settings come alive, including the bustle of a competent wait staff during a busy restaurant dinner shift. Even so, some readers might want to pass on this book. The dialogue is often sprinkled with language not generally spoken in polite company. The events include references to medical procedures as well as a disturbing backstory that explains Casey’s estrangement from her father. King avoids details and never sensationalizes, but these events are integral to the plot ... But for readers who dive in...this book will offer a full examination of creative life ... King shares these insights with a fresh perspective and an authenticity that suggests she draws upon personal experience.
For anyone who’s experienced (or is still experiencing) the dread feeling of being stuck in the life stage of 'becoming,' when it seems that everyone else has already 'become,' Lily King’s latest novel, Writers & Lovers, will strike a deep chord. With wit and what reads like deep insider wisdom, Ms. King captures the chronic low-level panic of taking a leap into the artsy unknown and finding yourself adrift, without land or rescue in sight ... Much as Daniel Defoe enthralled the earliest readers of the novel with descriptions of Robinson Crusoe’s fence building and goat milking, Ms. King pays Casey’s exhausting daily labors as a server at Iris the respect of particularity ... a comic and compassionate novel about the cost of (perhaps) sticking with the same dream for too long. It may not have the historical reach of Ms. King’s previous novel, but it shares with that novel a fascination with the difficulty of defining the worth of one’s life when the familiar markers of adult achievement are slow to materialize.
Once in a while you come across a novel whose protagonist is so engaging that you find yourself thinking, Oh no! or Don’t do that! interspersed with sighs of relief and some heartfelt rejoicing when things go right for a change. Lily King’s Writers & Lovers is one of those novels ... King is one of those rare writers who can entwine sadness, hilarity and burning fury in the briefest of moments. There’s a lot of this in her restaurant scenes, which are so finely observed that you may wonder if King ever worked in a sad little eatery once upon a time ... Casey’s story, like so many stories in real life, is messy. She’s messy. But King’s book isn’t. It’s a pleasure.
She paints a precise portrait of the dynamics of working in a restaurant as well as the world inhabited by Oscar’s children. She gently lampoons the literary scene, including the different ways in which men and women are treated ... Infused with tenderness and wry wit in equal measure, Writers & Lovers is King’s best book yet.
King reveals these characters’ motives gently. It’s easy to forget that the narrative is from a first-person perspective, as Casey is also gentle and doesn’t do anything out of a need for attention ... The book is set in 1997, but the themes King explores are just as potent today ... a skillfully crafted story that’s full of beautiful language and intellectual stimulation. She captures the young writer’s struggle.
... what reading Lily King’s fifth work of fiction does to you: It leaves you wide open and skinless, with the whole world feeling gorgeously palpable ... It could be trip-up territory, all too easy to lean on tropes or to get too authorial and esoteric. Instead, King gives us utterly relatable characters in settings, specifically Cambridge and Boston of the late 1990s, that vividly come to life, and a pace that clips along even as the prose begs you to slow down and savor ... King’s storytelling is propelled by her own secret engine, one fueled by exquisite detail, nuanced atmosphere and immense human insight. The restaurant scenes are particularly zippy and will resonate with anyone who has ever worked in F&B ... her fellow waiters...could have been throwaway characters, but through finely honed dialogue, King makes them memorable and multidimensional ... By harnessing the immense undertow of the heart, King tugs you into her tale of passion and grief, of seeking, striving and surrender ... This is a book for writers, and for lovers, and for any human with a heart. It made me a lover of King’s brilliant writing, and my guess is, she’ll pull you in, too.
... a sly, wryly comic novel ... Even if this were simply a novel about waitressing, that would be enough ... But this is also a novel about writing while doing whatever else it takes to make a living, and about doing so as a woman. King has some sharp points to make about the difficulties of the latter, many of which revolve around people’s thoughtless reactions to women’s writing ... King plays some neat tricks with the conventions of the romantic comedy here ... has one of the most completely satisfying endings around, both surprising and solidly in character ... Seemingly light and breezy, the novel has an impressively steely core.
Casey is a sharply observant main character, with a narrative voice that both sparkles and sometimes cuts. She is serious about being a writer, but doesn’t take that seriousness too far ... What does seem underplayed is Casey’s relationship with her deceased mother. King writes touchingly about the mother’s absence and the grief it inspires ... King has either waited tables or otherwise done her research, because the restaurant scenes, rendered in telling detail, bubble with energy. Casey has her rough edges, but she’s a thoroughly engaging protagonist. King writes dialogue that’s funny, melancholy and sometimes raw ... King mostly keeps the various conflicts in balance, veering away from both the melodramatic and the banal ... Charming, insightful and witty, Writers & Lovers is a perfect book for spring, offering hope that desire can be re-kindled, that grief can be held at bay and that good books will find publishers and an audience.
Casey tells us her story in a desperate first person that results in the kind of sentences one might scoff at in a book about writers...But in the context of the whole package, Casey’s story is anything but scoffable; her point of view, her struggles, and her ambitions come off as delightfully sincere ... I often thought while reading, maybe I could write like this someday—in order to mollify the bad things that feel even worse when I don’t write—or that I could at least give myself the pleasure of dipping into more books that make me feel like this ... On the surface, there’s nothing exactly special about King’s fifth novel ... The meta qualities of this novel about writing are what redeem her, as well as the man-boys she alternately desires and repels ... Each time I’ve read Writers & Lovers—first in a world where I felt almost too connected and then one where I physically ached for the people I took for granted—I was reminded of the power stories have in keeping us together. It’s writing like King’s that makes these days and nights of solitude feel okay.
The best thing about Writers & Lovers is that it’s very funny, almost from start to finish. Casey’s loneliness, while the main source of tension in the book, is also fertile soil for her and the narrator’s verbal and dramatic wit. The book makes you feel good pretty much throughout, especially at the end. And maybe overall, women are more likely to have an inherently better bead on Casey’s plights than are most men. Writers & Lovers appears to be an example of chick lit at just about its best, at least as Lucinda Rosenfeld describes it.
This is a very clever novel depicting as it does the writing process both physical and mental. The latter with its need to have confidence to invest time in writing with no real certainty that your work will be either good or considered fit for publication. Casey’s thoughts show this dilemma in all it’s painful twitches and unfolding ... King is an extraordinary skilled writer to give us the contradictions with such subtlety in this rolling account. But of particular interest was that she chose to see the issue—not just of the emerging writer—but to meld it with a woman’s wider uncertainties of life. She could have presented Casey as merely gawky, but instead we have a sympathetic portrait of a woman trying very hard to get on with life—and to be a creative achiever too. This is a very fine read—I will be looking for more of her books.
Loving well and writing well are interdependent in this novel, which is often the opposite of truth in real life, and yet it makes for a fully satisfying, emotionally weighted trip ... [a] dear and satisfying novel ... There is something so heartening about Casey, about her commitment to her art and her integrity in life. There’s also something so familiar about the elements that get in her way ... it is the kind of novel that inspires us to tread more sturdily toward our own dreams. It is the kind of novel that gives us hope.
... terrific ... much more than a triangular tale of grieving creatives in mutual thrall ... Though Oscar and Silas are vivid, richly drawn, and memorable, they never quite manage to compel on their own. Instead, they do what female characters have traditionally done in portrait after tiresome portrait of the artist as a self-centered young man. They’re helpmeets, vehicles, or (if you prefer) tools, and they’re only interesting in conjunction with Casey herself ... Writers & Lovers succeeds beautifully. By subverting a tired tradition, King ushers in a new era and shows us a thrilling new way.
The romance will draw readers in, but Casey’s journey as a writer, alone, is the book’s strongest magnet ... With deep and sensationally wrought feeling, King leaves no barrier between readers and smart, genuine, cynical, and funny Casey. A closely observed tale of finding oneself, and one’s voice, while working through grief.
King’s novel is help of a sort, an unmistakable broadside against fiction’s love affair with macho strivers, even — or especially — when layers of lyricism and tenderness coat their machismo ... The emotional force of Writers & Lovers is considerable, but it takes some time to land. As sometimes counterintuitively happens in autobiographical fiction, there’s a strange unconvincingness that hovers over stretches of this book. One wonders if not having to strenuously imagine this time and these circumstances means that some of the supporting characters and scenery feel more stock than a writer of King’s talent intends. She spends a bit too much time early on establishing the scene of the restaurant, with characters who feel like supporting players in a TV show. A reader could be forgiven for feeling a bit unchallenged and uninvested after 50 pages. But sticking with this novel offers rewards, and by the time Casey is shuttling between her romantic experiences with two very different men, King’s straightforward prose and deep feeling have hit their stride ... Things really fall into place for Casey as the novel draws to a close — in a pretty heavy-handed avalanche, actually. But King is too smart to send a character riding off into the sunset. She simply leaves Casey in a very promising place, no more or less precarious than she had been when things were bad and could turn good.
There is something familiar but somehow off-kilter about Writers & Lovers...like a beloved sitcom dubbed into another tongue ... the author is so adept at conjuring the machinations of restaurant life it might also be thought of as a workplace novel. But at heart, it is another, rarer sort of book ... Gen X readers will thrill to Writers & Lovers’ depiction of postgraduate ennui in the 1990s; younger readers will appreciate how the book inverts the strategy of Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. ... I wish the book had probed more deeply the fact that Casey has a profoundly broken relationship with her father ... This is a book unabashedly full of feeling—a daughter’s grief for her mother, a woman’s yearning to love someone worth it, an artist’s worry that her faith might be delusion ... Writers & Lovers has an almost deliriously happy ending. The story’s conclusion is recompense not only for what Casey endures—it’s a salve for us, the reader, the follies of our own younger selves. It’s a reminder that happiness, love, and artistic fulfillment are not too much to ask, that if having it all is a myth, you can still demand a whole hell of a lot. Yes, this is only a story, but you must admit, that is not a bad moral.
...a down-to-earth saga of an extremely bright and likable single woman wrestling with sexual desires, emotional dreads — and the difficulties of finishing her first novel ... It’s easy to pull for Casey. She’s wise, funny and clearly lovable ... while built around an agreeable character, is heavier on discourse than on drama — a book about writers seeking out writers and what feeds writers’ inner needs ... an engaging portrait of a woman confronting modern hardships.
... unafraid to be simultaneously humorous, intimate and insightful ... A joy of the novel is how fervently it throws the reader into the life of the writer and their community ... at once small yet also incredibly big ... not a book tied up with an elaborate bow but rather a parcel knotted with a string, something ordinary yet exquisite in its representation of love and life.
[King's] attention to detail in matters of setting is indicative of the care with which she treats the book as a whole ... full of moments of keen observation, of wry remarks about the challenges of writing and the awkwardness of early love. It’s also, at times, remarkably funny, filled with subtle and sometimes surprising one-liners that balance out what could have been a fairly bleak plot and instead sets the stage for something resembling a happy ending. This is the kind of novel that will be adored not only by Bostonians or 'creative types'; it offers insights and reassurances for anyone who has found themselves on the cusp of impending change, terrified of how a new beginning might also portend the loss of an old and beloved self.
As intimate — and vulnerable — as the acts of its title players, King's novel follows a deeply relatable protagonist navigating a whole menu of crises (some better drawn than others) surrounded by a cast of genuine, vivid characters. Writers, lovers, teachers, waiters, brothers, daughters, posers, friends—the book occupies a small space, but packs it to the brim with humanity.
... engaging ... King’s writing is spirited, clever and funny, and her novel is better than most others you’ll read this year. But perhaps Casey’s previous boyfriend Paco, who once told her that she hates men, had a point.
Casey is a near-prototype of a post-graduate with agonizing questions radiating out from the dream of being a writer ... In the midst of Casey’s long, difficult struggle, through which she does persevere, there may also be an element of self-indulgence that comes of being highly educated: the notion that if one can put up with the pain and considerable complexity, one can wait it out and keep trying different avenues until one finds the right way to one’s own home. The best readership for this novel may be those most fascinated by the real or imagined lives of artists, a journey that King has portrayed effectively and compassionately with well-crafted prose, evocative descriptions, and spot-on dialogue.
For the first quarter of this book, I was contemplating whether or not I should just put it down. It felt a little stream-of-consciousness-like and the threads weren’t coming together for me. However, I persevered and I’m so glad I did. I couldn’t put the book down after a while ... This ended up being a poignant and heartfelt novel about the effects of grief and the paths people take to get through life.
Ms. King strikes a balance between these two simultaneous love interests as easily as she did in Euphoria by avoiding the typical irritants of the love triangle dynamic and letting the situation instead provide further insight into Casey’s unattended demons. She inevitably must choose between the two men, but not before she spends time answering questions about her life she didn’t even know she had ... The majority of the narrative space is refreshingly dominated by Casey’s attempts to navigate the social politics of her restaurant job and make the right choice of man, but we get the sense that her writing is what helps her cope with these matters. It is the means by which she resolves the internal conflict of her past and present, and her way of putting into words all that she can’t say to the people around her ... What at first appears to be a surface-level, nostalgic venture into the life of a starving artist in the ’90s slowly becomes an examination of all that writing demands and provides. In this novel, writing is both passion and hardship, reprieve and punishment. It allows Casey to close earlier chapters of her life and open to a blank page ... a triumph of a novel, as witty as it is profound. A queen of nuance, Ms. King hides an arsenal of emotional power behind quiet, intentional prose. Nearly every word of this novel seems carefully and deliberately chosen, rewarding close readers and promising re-readers an even deeper experience. Most significantly, although Ms. King’s portrayal of a writer’s life is brutally honest, it urges all of us to personally take on the agony, but also the sublime ecstasy of the writer’s journey. After all, we all have something to say, it’s merely about finding the right words with which to say it.
It’s worth mentioning that the community of writers who people the coffee shops and bookstores of this novel seem a pretty narcissistic bunch. But the conversations that Casey has with them are terrific — King’s gift is to suspend the reader, to make the wait for resolution fascinating ... Readers of King’s 2014 novel, Euphoria, who are hoping for an even more remarkable novel in Writers & Lovers may be disappointed. There is nothing comparable to the brilliance of Nell Stone, a Margaret Meade stand-in in the earlier work, and the excitements of Writers & Lovers are on a smaller scale, though equally well written.
Three cheers--heck, make that four--for the writer who pulls off a fairly plotless novel. When there's not a lot going on, readers need gripping emotional stakes, which means extraordinarily deft characterizations. Naturally, it helps when a protagonist is unusually engaging, smart or sympathetic. In a neat hat trick, Lily King plants all three qualities in Casey Peabody, the narrator of her plot-light but payoff-heavy fifth novel ... Despite Casey's habitual teariness, her wit and chirpy optimism carry Writers & Lovers. It's not clear why the novel, with its timeless themes--choosing between the practical and the creative life, choosing between (as Casey's colleague puts it) 'fireworks and coffee in bed'--had to be set in 1997, but the book's title, with its fulcrum-like ampersand, makes perfect sense.
King, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Euphoria, delves into what is frequently first-novel territory but with the skill and assurance of a seasoned pro ... With the novel set in the 1990s, missed and unanswered phone calls drive the plot in ways that wouldn’t be possible in today’s world ... While never minimizing the seriousness of Casey’s personal problems, the book is also funny and romantic and hard to put down, full of well-observed details of restaurant culture and writer’s workshops. It’s hard to imagine a reader who wouldn’t root for Casey.
...[an] elegant, droll follow-up ... While King’s resolutions of Casey’s financial, emotional, and creative challenges don’t feel uniformly convincing, the nimble, astute narration appeals. This meditation on the passing of youth is touching and ruefully funny.
...with its young protagonist, its love triangle, and its focus on literary ambition, this charmingly written coming-of-age story would be an impressive debut novel. But after the originality and impact of Euphoria, it might feel a bit slight ... Read this for insights about writing, about losing one’s mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult four-top.
