Reader Score
71%
71% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 17 reviews on
Named to Most Anticipated and Must Read lists by Huffington Post, W, Nylon, Elle, Buzzfeed and Chicago Reader
Written by one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, Catherine Lacey's The Answers is a "novel of intellect and amplitude that deepens as it moves forward" (The New York Times) about a woman learning to negotiate her ailment via the simulacrum of a perfect romantic relationship. 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 couldn't diagnose, Mary seeks relief from a holistic treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia--PAKing, 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 that's even stranger than her symptoms or the New Agey PAKing. Mary's new job title is Emotional Girlfriend in the "Girlfriend Experiment"--the 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, casting himself as the experiment's only constant. Around Kurt, several women orbit as his girlfriends with specific functions. There's 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 Kurt's messy, ego-driven simulacrum of human connection. Told in Catherine Lacey's signature spiraling, hypnotic prose, The Answers is both a mesmerizing dive into the depths of one woman's psyche and a critical look at the conventions and institutions that infiltrate our most personal, private moments. As Mary struggles to understand herself--her body, her city, the trials of her past, the uncertainty of her future--the reader must confront the impossible questions that fuel Catherine Lacey's work: How do you measure love? Can you truly know someone else? Do we even know ourselves? And listen for Lacey's uncanny answers.Praise for The Answers
"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." --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, The 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