THE typical age of onset for social anxiety disorder — a disease which can make the most routine interactions, such as asking a stranger for directions or participating in a group discussion, fraught with agony — is 13, the threshold of young adulthood.

It is one of the most prevalent yet under-recognised mental conditions and this is the condition that afflicts 14-year-old Audrey Turner, the heroine of Sophie Kinsella’s latest novel, Finding Audrey. Audrey avoids talking to anyone but her immediate family and therapist, constantly wears dark glasses, and has temporarily left school.

Here is her reaction when her brother Frank’s friend Linus wanders into the den and says “Hi” to her: “My chest is starting to rise in panic. Tears have already started to my eyes. My throat feels frozen. I need to escape… ‘Sorry,’ I gasp, and tear through the kitchen like a hunted fox. Up the stairs. Into my bedroom. Into the furthest corner. Crouched down behind the curtain. My breath is coming like a piston engine and tears are coursing down my face. I need a Clonazepam, but right now I can’t even leave the curtain to get it. I’m clinging to the fabric like it’s the only thing that will save me.”

Kinsella has made a career writing deliciously frothy novels about women in relationships whose impulsiveness and apparent infantilism is vindicated by revelations in the last chapter. Since much of the humour in these books comes from the heroine’s behaving more immaturely than her years, one wonders if Audrey will have to regress to baby talk to make the classic Kinsella recipe work. Turns out, Kinsella turns the formula on its head, granting her youngest heroine a mature remove. It is her frazzled, unwitting parents, always at a loose end, who are recognisable as the hero-heroine duo of past Kinsella novels.

While Audrey recuperates from a breakdown which we are never really told about, her mum focuses her energies on breaking what she views as Frank’s screen addiction, in particular to a game called ‘Land of Conquerors’ (LoC). Mum might as well be a 38-year-old Becky Bloom (the heroine of Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic), who is reduced to spouting lines like “You can mock me all you like, but I take my responsibility as a parent seriously”.

Though the book is about Audrey, and narrated by her, the plot takes its cues from Frank’s life, starting from Mum threatening to throw out the computer, and climaxing at the LoC championships in which he wants to play for the prize pot of $6 million. It is clear from the outset that Frank’s gaming buddy Linus is going to be instrumental in helping her overcome her social phobia. Unfortunately, the storyline is flaccid and despite a minor lovers’ spat, there is no tension in Audrey and Linus’s relationship to keep us guessing.

While Finding Audrey retains traces of Kinsella’s trademark humour, the storytelling is markedly weak. Early in the novel, we are told that Audrey’s condition is “fully treatable” but the ending fulfills our expectations without any accompanying satisfaction. At times the book feel like it has been written for a campaign on social phobia awareness.

This is Kinsella’s first young adult novel and is certainly an odd tack for her to take. Becky’s out-of-control spending gave her first bestseller the name Confessions of a Shopaholic but led to no deeper investigations of an underlying disturbance.

Similarly impulsive, abnormal behavior in the The Undomestic Goddess in which Samantha, a successful lawyer, simply leaves her life and assumes a new identity as a housekeeper in the country, did not warrant a psychological investigation but through a mixture of fortuitousness and the heroine’s inherent gumption led to a happy resolution.

Fans of Kinsella may feel that she has been slipping of late. Her last novel, Wedding Night, pathetically attempted to recapture the freshness of her earlier humour and now this change of audience with Finding Audrey signals a flagging of creativity in her writing career. One hopes Kinsella gets over this mid-career crisis and recovers her voice to serve up more of the delicious froth she became famous for.

The reviewer is a Karachi-based freelance writer and critic.

Finding Audrey

(YOUNG ADULT)

By Sophie Kinsella

ISBN 978-0553536515

Delacorte Press, US

304pp.