By Dwight Garner / New York Times News Service
The novelist Catherine Lacey was born in Mississippi—for generations her family has owned the Tupelo Hardware Co., where Elvis Presley’s mother is said to have bought his first guitar—but you will strain to find evidence of stereotypical Southern themes or cadences in her work. She never tries to, as the critic Albert Murray put it, “sound a Faulkner chord”.
Lacey’s sentences are long and clean and unstanchable. They glow like the artist Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light tubes. In her new novel, The Answers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 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 Lacey’s second novel. Her first, Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), was about an intense young woman who fled to New Zealand after a failed marriage. The woman felt she was “a human non sequitur—senseless and misplaced, a bad joke, a joke with no place to land”.
Small first novels that are as good as Nobody Is Ever Missing inevitably make you fear the second. How much more is inside this writer? What are his or her reserves?
The Answers blows those sorts of questions out of the pond—it makes you feel embarrassed for thinking them. 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.
On a certain level, The Answers is a dystopian project; it borders on science fiction. It’s about the neurobiology of love. You remember Raymond Carver’s formulation: “It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.” In Lacey’s novel, that shame vanishes into MRIs, facial-detection software and artisanal electromagnetic pulses that can make a person weep or flush.
This is a “neuronovel”, in other words, to borrow the critic Marco Roth’s somewhat disparaging term for certain novels by writers like Ian McEwan, Rivka Galchen and Richard Powers. But it’s a neuronovel that floods with tangled human feeling.
Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s 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.
This heroine is Mary Parsons. She’s 30, underemployed, deeply in debt. She lives in New York City, and is sick with a raft of symptoms doctors cannot explain.
Lacey does not overplay her hand in terms of this book’s politics, but it becomes clear that men have tried to fiddle with Mary, mind, body and soul. “Every minute of her life,” she thinks, “had been rented or given to someone else.”
Her mind was mishandled by her religion-deranged father, from whom she is estranged. He home-schooled her, kept her hidden, ignorant, off the grid, remote from popular culture and “in a state of complete purity”. She grew as if in a carpeted hole.
Her body has lately been given over to a fey fellow named Ed, who performs upon her an expensive and invasive kind of “neuro-physio-chi bodywork,” to put it in the words of a friend. Mary has tried Western medicine, and it has failed her. She repairs to Ed’s massage table at her wits’ end.
This bodywork is called PAKing, or Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia. (Imagine Rolfing with grievous pretensions.) Mary describes these three-hour sessions as “an odd blend of exercise, therapy, first date and ceremony”.
And her soul? Well, that’s where this novel begins to rise aloft, on chemicals, pheromones and the power of the author’s interrogative grace. At a health-food store, Mary spies an ad, tacked to a bulletin board, for an “income-generating experience”.
The job requires an Ivy League degree, CPR training and “knowledge of foreign affairs”, as if she were applying to be a lifeguard at the Kennedy School of Government. She ends up signing on for an emotional experiment at the hands of scientists, and at the same time a “Girlfriend Experiment” that involves an emotionally bored and creatively stunted famous actor/director named Kurt.
He’s hiring a harem, of sorts, to meet his emotional needs—an Anger Girlfriend to nag and throw things at him, a Maternal Girlfriend to make him grilled-cheese sandwiches, a Mundanity Girlfriend to creatively mope around and so on.
Mary will be the Emotional Girlfriend, there to listen and maintain strong eye contact and text him and be able to cry. Kurt falls in love with her—or does he?—partly because, thanks to her culturally stunted childhood, she has no idea who he is.
To give away much more of the book’s plot would do a disservice to The Answers. It comes to be a meditation on fame and art, as well as love. A suspension of disbelief will sometimes be required. Lacey makes you happy to submit. She casts a spell.