I love this book so much, It's like The Golden Notebook crossed with You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. It's everything I wanted to read.

The Answers is a brave attempt at something new - part sci-fi, part technological thriller, part romance. But as this genre mashup attempts to explore the scientific implications of modern love, it fails to coalesce into something tangible and real. Hardly any of the characters are likable or engaging, and the book shifts perspectives too often without warning, asking readers to become invested in characters they hardly know.

Weird and really wonderfully written with evocative descriptions, with engaging if not quite likeable characters. A satire, it shifts between lightness and sincerity.

A common personality feature that people attribute to themselves is that they live in their head. The protagonist in this novel is the extreme of a person living in their head. Mary is solitary and thinks about every detail of her life, day by day. Her only friend, Chandra, helps her out and seems to be her alter ego with bold moves. Mary fled her life with a religious, cultist father and lived for her later school years with her aunt, Merle. She then went to college where she roomed with Chandra and they set out to live life together.

The significant aspect of this novel is the skill of the writer. It is my first Catherine Lacey novel and I'm sure I will go back and read her first one. Lacey's writing flows and catches brilliant aspects of life and the characters that populate it. This was an outstanding novel for me so far this year.

ARC courtesy of NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I'm not sure why I couldn't finish this but I didn't. The concept is interesting and the writing is good but the plot (such as it is) just left me cold. This is a fine literary novel for those who are interested in identity but it wasn't for me.

THE ANSWERS by Catherine Lacey

Have you had a chronic illness? Indeterminate symptoms that ebb and flow confounding doctors and holistic practitioners alike? Ever prostrate yourself on the floor of an abandoned warehouse to experience Reiki as explained by a recently ordained eight-year old?

No?

Just me?

Junia - or er, Mary, is ill. She lumbers through NY, more a compilation of symptoms than a person, and possibly not even sure she is one anymore. After countless attempts at remedy which leave her sanity and bank account eviscerated, she is referred to a PAKing Practitioner - PAKing being a unique combination of Touch/ Energy/ Zero Balancing/ Reiki / Meditation Treatment which miraculously assuages her discomfort. And, as with most magical alternative cures, it is prohibitively expensive.

In order to scrounge up enough cash to get by, Mary answers a mysterious Craigslist Ad to be a high paid - well, she is not sure what exactly, - but through a serious of rigorous interviews, she becomes part of a well-compensated experiment: a “Girlfriend Experiment” for the megalomaniac tortured star of the era, who is convinced that romantic relationships are thwarting his creativity. So, he creates an experiment breaking down the facets of Girlfrienddom and a team of experts casts a woman in each role, my favorite of which is “Mundanity Girlfriend,” whose directives include sharing the space with the star but not exactly acknowledging him: “stare absently out a window in a daze for up to three minutes at a time,” “look in his direction, but not in his eyes…smile, slightly, as if you are thinking about something else.” There is of course “Intimacy Girlfriend,” “Anger Girlfriend,” “Maternal Girlfriend,” and as Mary discovers, “Emotional Girlfriend.”

If the quirky absurdity of the premise doesn’t reel you in, the writing will. Lacey’s prose reads like poetry: utterly human, intimately clandestine and pathetically humorous. The content harkens to Dave Egger’s THE CIRCLE and Graeme Samson’s THE ROSIE PROJECT and the insightful narrator calls to mind Alexandra Gleeman’s YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE and Miranda July’s THE FIRST BAD MAN.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit I was slightly disappointed at the end of the novel. But whether I just didn’t want it to end or I was searching for answers that it wouldn’t give me, I’m not entirely sure. I highlighted dozens of passages in the book and just this moment sent them to a friend to appreciate. The writing is so deep that it seems to resonate at a cellular level. And I wonder if that’s all we all are - an assemblage of random molecules in space, unsure systems negotiating a precarious balance, a collection of cells, congregating in the curvature of a large question mark rather than a definitive period.



*I received a galley via NetGalley for an honest review.