As bad sex goes, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a scene more virtuosically dire than the six-page encounter that materialises partway through Weirdo, comedian Sara Pascoe’s characterful debut novel. It takes place on a futon, beneath a sheet so crumb-covered it’s exfoliating. While wishing she knew “how to stop sex without it being embarrassing”, first-person narrator Sophie splices clinical detail with surreal flights of associative fancy that have her picturing, say, a tube train full of tongues wearing ties.
Much about the book’s tone and content will be familiar to Pascoe’s fans. Like the sitcom Out of Her Mind, which she wrote and starred in, it depicts a woman struggling to conform to the kinds of relationships and responsibilities that others make look so easy. It also shares the preoccupations of Pascoe’s nonfiction titles, Animal and Sex Power Money – buzzy disquisitions on dating and mating that blitzed memoir with evolutionary biology and feminism to entertaining, sometimes enlightening effect.
At 32, Weirdo’s oddball heroine is grappling with the consequences of having trailed a work crush named Chris all the way to Australia in order to casually bump into him. It left her massively in debt and prompted her boyfriend to dump her – then get engaged to her sister. When Chris, back in the UK, happens to walk into the Essex pub where she’s working (it’s called the Slipper – note the Cinderella connotations), it seems like fate, and the plot loosely tracks her attempts to seize this second chance.
Just how far from “normal” is Sophie? Her paranoia suggests she’s not merely kooky but needs real help, and this can make for uncomfortable laughter. Often, however, the predicaments she finds herself in are relatable enough that the reader experiences Pascoe’s astute observational comedy as a blast of sanity. There’s melancholy here, too: “sometimes thirst feels like homesickness”, Sophie reflects when that sex scene is finally over.
Beyond its author’s own oeuvre, Weirdo is a tricky novel to place: romcom-style wisdom about not cutting your own hair while crying sits alongside passages about Albert Camus and self-determination. Although this is no bad thing, its propensity to meander does take a toll on narrative momentum. That’s a shame, because the ending is sublime, cleverly tying up with tender farce all of the book’s most subversive ideas about romance and lust and the added power that storytelling gives them in our lives.
Weirdo by Sara Pascoe is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
