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 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, cast - ing himself as the experiment’s only constant. Around Kurt, several women orbit as his girlfriends with spe - cific 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.
"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
"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
"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)
"[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
