Writers & Lovers by Lily King: better than most other novels you’ll read this year

“Another f***ing flake.” So Casey Peabody, the 31-year-old narrator of Lily King’s fifth novel, tells her friend Muriel. She’s talking about a man, of course, and men do not fare well in this engaging literary tale about a struggling, debt-ridden writer navigating her way through life’s problems, fearful that she is wasting her life, but determined at any cost to finish that novel.

Set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1997, Casey is also grieving her dead mother and living in her brother’s friend’s potting shed, making ends meet by waiting tables at Iris, a fashionable restaurant in Harvard Square.

As far as men are concerned, Casey got off to an abysmal start. Her father was a teacher who turned out to be a peeping tom, fired for spying on the girls’ locker rooms. It was Casey who blew the whistle, and she is now estranged from him. Her landlord is another creep, needy and desperate for admiration.

Then there is Luke, a poet she fell for at a writer’s workshop on Rhode Island, and is still hung up on, even though he told her their relationship is evil and might be the work of the devil. Even though, as she later discovers, he is still married. “It’s good to get whacked open at least once,” Muriel tells her, “you can’t really love from inside a big, thick shell.”

Her current romantic options seem to be Silas, George or Oscar, or maybe a combination; they are also all writers. Silas, “tall and bent like he’s loping”, with a scratchy voice and a chipped tooth, asks her out, but bails at the last minute, leaving a message on her answerphone that he’s leaving town. George’s problem is that after three years he’s written only 11 and a half pages of his novel, “and that kind of thing is contagious”.

Perhaps recently widowed Oscar, 47, and an acclaimed writer with two small sons, will prove a better bet. She is seduced by his piercing green eyes, confidence and apparent maturity; he is entranced by her youthful exuberance. “I’d like to meet a guy who wants what he says he wants,” she tells Muriel.

But even Oscar turns out to be just another disappointment, an egotist wrapped up in his own sense of failure, with no inkling of her interior life. “Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule… I thought I was choosing delusional men… Now I understand it’s how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood,” she observes

Really? Are all men raised that way; is it really all nurture? “Men-acing. Men-dacious. Men-tal,” she reflects. “They have no control. They justify everything their dicks make them do. And they get away with it. Nearly every time.”Again, do they? 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.

Writers & Lovers by Lily King (Picador, £14.99), buy it here.