Everyone wants to be happy, but what serious reader wants to read about happiness? The French author Henry de Montherlant said that “happiness writes in white ink on a white page.” It can’t be captured; not with dignity, anyway. Happy art so often equals kitsch. The poet Edward Hirsch, in response to Montherlant’s edict, once wrote: “I don’t believe that only sorrow/and misery can be written.”

The novelist Lily King must be in Hirsch’s camp. Her new book, “Writers & Lovers,” set in 1997, begins in mourning and frustration, but it more or less persuasively opens out to genuine, even giddy, hope.

Its narrator, Casey Peabody, is a 31-year-old who bikes three miles to and from work as a waitress in Harvard Square. She lives in a small room — a former potting shed that still smells like “loam and rotting leaves” — attached to the garage of a friend of her brother’s. In opening lines that are both breezy and potent, Casey says: “I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. I’m like a teenager trying not to think about sex. But I’m also trying not to think about sex.”

So, problems with cash flow and love life. The two other most salient facts about Casey, she soon reveals, are that she is an aspiring writer and that her mother has recently died. Years earlier, including time spent in an M.F.A. program, Casey had a cohort of wannabe writer friends, but they’ve all abandoned the craft, except for one woman who has been “working on a novel set during World War II for as long as I’ve known her.”