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A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award
"Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, [The Answers] is also a novel about a subjugated woman, in this case not to a totalitarian theocracy but to subtler forces its heroine is only beginning to understand and fears she is complicit with." --Dwight Garner, New York Times
Mary Parsons is broke. Dead broke, really: between an onslaught of medical bills and a mountain of credit card debt, she has been pushed to the brink. Hounded by bill collectors and still plagued by the painful and bizarre symptoms that doctors couldnt diagnose, Mary seeks relief from a holistic treatment called Pneuma Adaptive KinesthesiaPAKing, for short. Miraculously, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive. Like so many young adults trying to make ends meet in New York City, Mary scours Craigslist and bulletin boards for a second job, and eventually lands an interview for a high-paying gig thats even stranger than her symptoms or the New Agey PAKing.
Marys new job title is Emotional Girlfriend in the Girlfriend Experimentthe brainchild of a wealthy and infamous actor, Kurt Sky, who has hired a team of biotech researchers to solve the problem of how to build and maintain the perfect romantic relationship, cast - ing himself as the experiments only constant. Around Kurt, several women orbit as his girlfriends with spe - cific functions. Theres a Maternal Girlfriend who folds his laundry, an Anger Girlfriend who fights with him, a Mundanity Girlfriend who just hangs around his loft, and a whole team of girlfriends to take care of Intimacy. With so little to lose, Mary falls headfirst into Kurts messy, ego-driven simulacrum of human connection.
Told in Catherine Laceys signature spiraling, hypnotic prose, The Answers is both a mesmerizing dive into the depths of one womans psyche and a critical look at the conventions and institutions that infiltrate our most personal, private moments. As Mary struggles to understand herselfher body, her city, the trials of her past, the uncertainty of her futurethe reader must confront the impossible questions that fuel Catherine Laceys work: How do you measure love? Can you truly know someone else? Do we even know ourselves? And listen for Laceys uncanny answers.
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions12.9 x 1.8 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-109781783782185
- ISBN-13978-1783782185
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Review
Praise for The Answers
Recommended reading by Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, W, Nylon, Elle, Buzzfeed, and Kirkus
"[The Answers] has the effortless sparkle and speed of something written by an author with a dozen novels behind her instead of just one. It is funny and eerie and idea-dense--a flavor combination that turns out to be addictive . . . [The Answers] bites off a lot more than Lacey's debut, and it does a much better job of chewing it. This is a breathtaking leap to witness, and a promising trajectory to follow. On the basis of The Answers, I'd read anything Catherine Lacey tried her hand at: science fiction, a screenplay, an epic poem . . . hell, a limerick. And as many novels as she possibly could." --Molly Young, New York Times Book Review
"Lacey's sentences are long and clean and unstanchable . . . she sweeps you up in the formidable current of her thought, and then she drops you down the rabbit hole. She's the real thing, and in The Answers she takes full command of her powers . . . This is a novel of intellect and amplitude that deepens as it moves forward, until you feel prickling awe at how much mental territory unfolds . . . Lacey's special gift is for capturing the realistic flickering of individual consciousness." --Dwight Garner, New York Times
"The Answers is in part a sparkling satire of our era of big data . . . But the novel is also a poignant spiritual lament, deepening the themes of Ms. Lacey's excellent debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing . . . [Lacey's] searching, religious dimensions add to the fresh commentary on present-day godheads to make The Answers not just one of the most ingenious novels of 2017 but also one of the most moving." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"This is Lacey's specialty: She captures with eerie precision the strangeness of being a person in the world, living alongside other human beings with unknowable thoughts and feelings . . . Reading Lacey's fiction feels like walking through a dark apartment in someone's mind, full of winding hallways and unmarked doors. You never know quite where you are or where you'll end up. Like the work of Clarice Lispector or Rachel Cusk, Lacey's novels seem to be on the verge of inventing a new genre somewhere between prose poem and fugue state." --Joy Press, Los Angeles Times
"Haunting . . . [The Answers is] a quiet, calm, somewhat circuitous rumination on what we miss and miss out on when our connections to other human beings are synthetic. And it serves as a reminder that sometimes the fiction that feels most relevant to a hallucinatory political moment is not itself overtly political . . . A thoughtful, complex, feminist book that artfully mines the fun-house insanity of 21st century American womanhood by a uniquely talented writer who knows not to put forth any answers, only more questions." --Nina Renata Aron, New Republic
"Such an inventive setup isn't merely an excuse for Lacey to show off her considerable inventiveness. It also allows her to dig into some fertile philosophical ground, raising questions to which the novel, against its title and like all good art, offers no final answers . . . Love is a strange, strange thing, and so is the self. No one in contemporary fiction does a better job of showing us these facts than Catherine Lacey." --Anthony Domestico, Boston Globe
"Catherine Lacey's dating dystopia The Answers is this summer's must-read novel . . . A darkly funny, tartly feminist look at the tender state of our bodies and souls in the Information Age . . . [Lacey's] work manages to be both conceptual and human, socially aware and mordant--think DeLillo for millennials--[and it] captures the absurdity of a culture that persists in thinking that enlightenment is a matter of the right purchase, hashtag, or Google search." --Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"The genius of Catherine Lacey lies in the fact that her new book, The Answers, doesn't feel like too much; the pieces are bizarre and timely and fit together like puzzle pieces into a somehow timeless examination of humanity . . . Lacey's prose radiates elegance beneath its unassuming, unflashy surface; there's nary a maladroit word or an unrevealing detail. She skillfully balances a truly absurd array of hot-button topics and weird narrative twists, playing them off each other virtuosically to weave a surreal-feeling story with deeply pragmatic concerns." --Claire Fallon, Huffington Post
"Lacey pulls off a diverting and provocative satire, studded with episodes of real gravity, without engaging in slapstick. The ironies are buried deep in the novel's symmetrical structure and never played for laughs, though there are enough deadpan comic revelations to qualify Lacey, as some critics have already suggested, as an heir to Don DeLillo in White Noise mode. " --Christian Lorentzen, New York
"Catherine Lacey examines, with clinical chill and precision, late-capitalism's perversions of love . . . The Answers cinches [Lacey's previous accolades] while forging new narrative territory. It's more plot-driven and ruthless than Nobody Is Ever Missing, a world more familiar with the carnal cruelty of a Mary Gaitskill story than Adler's aphoristic prose . . . Part of the sheer pleasure of The Answers is that its cultural influences reach high and low--Lacey is as fluent in feminist critiques of 81/2 as she is in the most satisfying tropes of genre fiction . . . A genuine satire with emotional and philosophical punch." --J. Jezewska Stevens, BOMB
"Complex and haunting . . . Masterful . . . Lacey writes loneliness and solitude with a profound depth, injecting life into the anxious fluttering of those wondering, wandering individuals who just don't know what to do with themselves and who can't stop asking life's most impenetrable questions." --Laura Adamcyzyk, The A.V. Club
"[The Answers] directs [its] energy into an unpredictable, layered plot that will likely take most readers by surprise . . . For Lacey's remarkable skill to be fully embraced, we may need a new genre to categorize her work under . . . Her sentences are like reading an iconic prose style before it's become iconic." --Joshua James Amberson, Los Angeles Review of Books
"For a novel that's so cerebral, The Answers is impressively tightly plotted and Lacey's prose notably refined in its lucidity. It's an exciting and clever follow-up to her acclaimed debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing, and testifies to her inclusion on Granta's recent best of young American novelists list . . . The Answers is an unsettling, but whip-smart meditation on love, intimacy and contemporary female experience, minus the fairytale ending." --Lucy Scholes, The Independent
"Catherine Lacey is one of the most intelligent and brittle and funny writers of her generation. In The Answers, she builds--out of the raw stuff of bewilderment and absence--a soaring, heartbreaking work that's just on the right side of being nearly too beautiful to bear." --Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
"Remarkable . . . Lacey displays an exceptional ability to articulate the elusiveness of knowing others, as well as the desire to find meaning and trust within." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Startling and stunning and compulsively strange, Lacey's sophomore novel is a haunting investigation into the nature of love . . . With otherworldly precision and subtle wit, Lacey creates a gently surreal dreamscape that's both intoxicating and profound. A singular novel; as unexpected as it is rich." --Kirkus (starred review)
"Lacey is particularly attuned to the emotional elasticity of her female characters, especially as they face problems that can feel physically taxing . . . [She] makes it easy to believe women, which been, as we all know, perhaps the hardest thing to do from a narrative standpoint at any particular time in history . . . Lacey manages to entertain us as she makes a point about women on the fringe." --Kaitlin Phillips, Bookforum
"An adept novel . . . Lacey digs into the choppy turf beneath a woman's relationship to her body, her identity and her search for balance between independence and meaningful relationships . . . Lacey doesn't give us answers, but she sure gives us a wild story with a memorable protagonist." --Shelf Awareness
"Surreal, thought-provoking, and intriguingly untidy" --Booklist
--This text refers to the mp3_cd edition.About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 1783782188
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 9781783782185
- ISBN-13 : 978-1783782185
- Item weight : 215 g
- Dimensions : 12.9 x 1.8 x 19.8 cm
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Catherine Lacey is the author of five books— Biography of X, Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and the story collection Certain American States. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award.
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“There are so many ways to live and die, so many ways to tell that same story, over and over, but a better way to tell it, a more real way to look into someone else’s face to say, I am alive like you, was born without my consent like you, will someday be dead in the same way you’ll be dead. What did we really want from it?”
Although, this maybe a normal question to many of us deep thinkers, this story does not approach the answers to any traditional behaviors or collection of characters to lead you in search of anything except the bizarre, entertaining, and sometimes saddening brutal truths of what is becoming more than common among the storied lives of everyone today.
The creation of Catherine Lacey’s complex world of people mixed in an intricate plot to expose the vulnerabilities of each character is genius. First, there are many unique characters you will find as you read along through to the end. I will just mention the two I found most important. The main character is a young woman who has been sheltered all of her life from all technology, no radio, TV, cellular phones, or newspapers. She was home schooled in the mountains of Tennessee by her two extremely strict religious parents until she was almost a teen. Finally, her Aunt stepped in and she never looked back. Mary is a very sick young woman when we meet her and when her path crosses that of The Experiment . Kurt Sky’s an obsessive, elaborate, extremely famous Actor/Film Director who is set on developing his Scientifically Reseached film he has been striving to finish for over a decade. The masterpiece includes the effects of a mixed collection of popular excessive trends in our culture such as technology, drug experimentation, exercise and yoga, sexual relationships without emotional attachments, meditation and spiritual advisors used for health care many other ideas that seem rather hilarious. But the experience is written seriously and adds the incentives greed, lust, fame and other motivational precursors to encourage those in the actual experiment knowing or unknowingly to develop data to find the “Answers” in search of truly successful human love relationships. Each person usually says that they would be happy to love and be loved by that person they love in return. Now that is some people. Some would rather just be rich to be happy and believe that is all they need. Therefore, my title: The Answers just create more questions !
I highly recommend this book to anyone. The writing style is like others who love references to the fine arts and classics in literature. I do not like comparing authors to others but since she is new and I would love for you to read her, I think Carherine Lacey writes similar to Donna Tartt without the details that make for long lengthy books as we usually see from Donna Tartt. Maybe it is because they are both from Mississippi. Catherine Lacey is brilliant , so set your dictionary beside you! I learned a new word to use! I do love to learn when I read. For the film fanatics, there is plenty of technique and classic film noir inside.
I am looking forward to the next Catherine Lacey release .
And that's probably a good thing, because the principal character, Mary Parsons, is really dull as dishwater. You can use a little distance from her. Homeschooled, the child of off the grid parents, Mary finally escapes to her aunt, and ends up at a dead end job in New York. She suffers from various psychosomatic disorders, the treatment for which is keeping her broke, until finally her friend Chandra recommends Ed, some kind of new age guru who manages to cure the symptoms.
At the same time she applies for, and is hired for, a mysterious project in which a famous actor/director, Kurt Sky, is looking for various "girlfriends" in order to research how their bodies and mental states react to their assigned roles. And how he reacts to them. Mary becomes the emotional girlfriend. She is given strict instructions as to how to react to and with him.
The kicker is this: Mary has never heard of Kurt, who seems to be some sort of Orson Welles figure, who has been trying to finish a film for the past 10 years.
The book's format is also a stunt. The first and third parts are told in first person by Mary; the second (longest) part is told in third person, and through different povs. In addition to Mary, there is Ashley, who plays the angry girlfriend in the research project; Kurt, the director; Mathison, the head of the project, A couple of other minor characters also have their moments, for no apparent reason that I could see.
Thing is, the writing style--flat, emotionless, seamless (and really Ms. Lacey's prose is the best thing about this novel)--is the same in all sections. It was done so smoothly I hardly noticed the transition from first to third person until part 3, when we're back with Mary.
The various characters declaim more than speak (that italics thing again), and the whole business about the research project seems to be part tongue-in-cheek. Seems. I have no idea what the author intended. There is this syfy "If this goes on" vibe about the whole project, which is designed to manipulate one's physiology, for study by the researchers and to get them to fall in love or in hate or whatever. And maybe the author designed the book as a warning. Or maybe, like Jennifer Egan's "Look at Me," she's just attempting social satire.
I've no idea, really. But it held my interest. Let's call it a valiant effort.
Notes and asides: Four letter words, some violence. It might make an interesting movie if Brit Marling and her crew get hold of it.