CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED, by Jessica Stanley
Jessica Stanley’s entertaining new novel, “Consider Yourself Kissed,” is a variation on the girl-meets-boy genre with all of the obligatory elements of love, ambition and family, set during a tumultuous political decade in England. Funny, smart and memorable, this contemporary romance offers a lucid example of how humanity can endure amid a daily churn of horrendous news.
The reader meets Coralie in 2013: A copywriter and aspiring novelist, she’s recently moved to London from Sydney. (The author, whose first novel, “A Great Hope,” was published only in Australia in 2022, is also an Australian now living in London.) “Although she was totally alone,” Stanley writes, “Coralie Bower, aged 29 and a half, was certainly not unhappy!” Soon Coralie meets Adam, a divorced journalist, and his charming 4-year-old daughter, Zora, in a chance encounter in Victoria Park. Let’s just say a lot happens during their initial meeting — and then in the subsequent 10 years, in both Coralie’s personal life and the political landscape of the United Kingdom.
Fans of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel “The Group” will recognize in Stanley’s title the sign-off of Harald Petersen’s letters to his future wife, Kay Strong. After Adam finds the book beside Coralie’s bed, they start signing their texts and emails “C.Y.K.” In a 1962 interview, McCarthy said her novel “was conceived as a kind of mock-chronicle novel. It’s a novel about the idea of progress, really. The idea of progress seen in the female sphere. … It’s supposed to be the history of the loss of faith in progress.”
This is exactly what Stanley sets out to do in her novel: chronicle one woman’s pursuit of fulfillment on multiple fronts, while updating McCarthy’s concerns — with the tensions between female identity and domesticity, motherhood and creativity — for a newer generation. In due course, the reader meets the extended family — Adam’s ex-wife and her Tory husband; Zora’s “gay grannies,” Anne and Sally; Coralie’s brother and his considerably older boyfriend; the siblings’ estranged, narcissistic father; a poodle named Madonna. We learn about Coralie’s broken relationship with her mother, who is battling terminal cancer back in Australia and who provides the context for the protagonist’s underlying quest for unconditional love.
It is enjoyable to read about this idiosyncratic blended family and their efforts and failures to care for one another across an eventful decade that sees births and deaths, renovations and resentments, as well as Brexit and Covid. When Anne asks Coralie when she is planning to get pregnant during their first visit, Coralie thinks: “Who was Anne to snap on her latex gloves, slice and dig into Coralie’s chest, yank out her most cherished private dreams, and examine them like an excised tumor? She wished she’d phoned her own mother when she’d had the chance. But that would have left her empty in a different way.”
Amid the private dramas that come with the territory of long-term relationships, Stanley deftly animates the heightened tensions outside the home — the ascension of Conservatism with Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson, a global pandemic — reminding the reader that it’s impossible to separate the personal from the political, particularly when one is living amid the “rising tides of authoritarianism.” Covering it all as a political commentator in newspaper articles, a podcast and several books, Adam sees his career ascend while Coralie remains in her dead-end brand-agency job and shelves her dreams of becoming a novelist.
Like “The Group,” “Consider Yourself Kissed” asks whether women can escape the constraints of gender when it comes to the precarious balance of partnership and selfhood. “The price Coralie paid for love was fear and getting lost,” Stanley writes. “Something was wrong with her, it set her apart — she couldn’t be in love, but she couldn’t be out of it either. If she didn’t love, she was half a person. But if she did love, she’d never be whole.”
Whether or not “a room of one’s own” is truly viable for Coralie, or for women in general, in an era of socially regressive politics, Stanley’s delightful novel reminds her readers of the joy, humor and even subtle hope that can be experienced during life’s lowest moments.
CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED | By Jessica Stanley | Riverhead | 326 pp. | $30
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