Debut novel about love, rebuilding

Sophie and Alex, the beatific lovers from Aley Waterman’s debut novel “Mudflowers,” share the rarest of bonds. The couple’s friendship inevitably turns to romance because of their multiple personal intersections, which include growing up in the East Coast town of Corner Brook, N.L., and the fact that both of their mothers are missing from their lives (Alex’s has abandoned the family, while Sophie’s has succumbed to a terminal illness).

After moving to the west end of Toronto, Sophie becomes smitten with a poet named Maggie and pursues the attraction. Alex has always been tolerant of a degree of openness in their relationship, but a horrible corruption begins to taint it when Alex and Maggie start seeing each other clandestinely. The rift is so catastrophic that Sophie escapes to Saint-Erme in the Champagne region of France, taking refuge in an artist colony where she can continue making stained glass mosaics with an undeviating focus.

Following her return to Canada, Sophie resolves to accept Maggie and Alex’s love affair. As Sophie navigates feelings of alienation as a romantically estranged third wheel, a life-changing event threatens to unbalance the trio’s friendship.

Waterman, a writer and musician who was mentored by Canadian novelist Sheila Heti, examines the boundaries of trilateral relationships with an observant and honest facility. Written in casual but philosophically minded prose, the book’s insights are most powerful when linked to Sophie’s states of emotional resignation. Sophie’s grief over the loss of her mother, for example, is portrayed with humanity.

The novel is less successful in characterizing Sophie outside of her grief and devotion, and when her attention turns to other subjects, her observations can digress. For example, Sophie describes the work of Jia Tolentino, concerning the way that “the internet has created a culture of neoliberal-tailored individuality that confuses empathy with sameness, the result being that now people think that identity politics means you can’t empathize with someone unless you have their specific racial and socioeconomic background, an idea which is fundamentally damning to the Left.”

Such pronouncements establish a sense of time and cultural specificity, but miss an opportunity to say something about political consciousness coalescing around one’s identity. Would Tolentino’s ideas unseat Sophie’s notions of romantic freedom or damage an empathic connection with a partner? These threads are sometimes given short shrift, signifying little more than Sophie’s inquisitive temperament.

Sophie spends much of the novel positioned on the precipice of something momentous; it is not until the end of the novel, when she has found a “cause” worth fighting for on the windy shores of Newfoundland, that glimpses of her purpose emerge. Her self-doubt, confusion and aimlessness seem to give way to the understanding that “it’s important to stay close to people who love you enough that they will let you be yourself, even in moments of ugliness or unreason,” an idea that trumps even the most ordinary forms of loathing.

JEAN MARC AH-SEN IS THE TORONTOBASED AUTHOR OF “GRAND MENTEUR, IN THE BEGGARLY STYLE OF IMITATION,” AND A PARTICIPANT IN THE COLLABORATIVE NOVEL “DISINTEGRATION IN FOUR PARTS.”