The Möbius Book
By Catherine Lacey
FSG, 240 pages, $27
Catherine Lacey is a writer of extraordinary gifts, with hard-earned adult wisdom and the kind of effortless sentence-to-sentence felicity that makes any writer reading her strongly consider pursuing alternate careers. Given the achievements of her first four novels, most famously her 2014 breakout Nobody Is Ever Missing, the failure of her latest, The Möbius Book—and it is unfortunately a failure—is probably best read less as an indictment of her writing and more as a case study for a broader diagnosis of what’s gone awry with contemporary literature.
The book is written in two, only lightly attached, sections. One is a fictional account of two old friends chatting on Christmas Eve. The other—published upside down, pretentiously enough—is a memoir of the narrator’s brutal breakup with a man she refers to always as “The Reason” (as in “the reason I’d turned from inhabitant to visitor”). In addition to achieving maximum discomfort for readers, the unorthodox arrangement is meant to emphasize the Möbius strip idea expressed in the title: Everything loops back on itself, and life (at least past a certain age) is an endless sequence of conversations about other moments and other conversations.
“Lacey seems to be inhabiting a Renata Adler-esque zone of pure perception.”
Other than having to keep turning my phone around as I read, I didn’t particularly mind this format or, often, the novel’s plotlessness. With a kind of hyper-urbane sophistication, Lacey seems to be inhabiting a Renata Adler-esque zone of pure perception. The stories themselves don’t particularly matter—they all pretty much end the same way, there’s love, which usually starts with “easy laughter” and then there’s what Lacey calls “the black hole of the end of love,” which means “billions in lawyer fees paid by women divorcing people they had married because of all that easy laughter.”
After not too long, I began to feel like a philistine even for wanting some sort of plot—for wanting to know, for instance, whether the liquid pooling out of the door of the apartment neighboring the conversationalists’ was paint or in fact blood. Instead, I began to treat The Möbius Book like “wisdom literature,” a dizzying array of tightly-formulated proverbs on life and life, almost all of them deserving to be copied down and internalized.
Of smoking, Lacey describes “the magic trick of a cigarette, how it seemed capable of changing the direction of any given emotion,” which seems straightforward and unadorned enough except that I’ve never seen somebody describe cigarette-smoking with quite this precision. Of the halcyon period of a relationship, she writes, “her wife’s certainty would be the lighthouse of the family life, the velocity that kept the whole thing aloft,” and of the bitter late stage of a friendship, “that honeyed disdain that can fall between two people who know each other intimately and yet still fall short of telling the most intimate truths.”
This is all wonderful, and there’s plenty more where that came from. It’s the kind of steely, clear-eyed perspective that you’re always startled to discover in somebody the same generation as you are, and is rooted in the kind of flinty knowledge that breakups are never really something you ever get over no matter how many of them you have, that after grief you are never really ok, that there are no surprises, and that the only possible meaning can come in life narrating itself back to itself, in the elegant sublimation of pain.
I was perfectly ready to end things here, to give a glowing review to the first half of the book (the Christmas Eve conversation between the old friends Edie and Marie) and to give a pass to the second half, which just doesn’t work in the same way. What I was tempted to say is that, like in baseball, where some switch hitters are far better from one side of the plate than the other, in writing some people are inexplicably much better in first or third person. David Foster Wallace wasn’t a fraction of the writer he was when he’d move from first person to third; conversely, something in Lacey’s style craters once she’s in first person. In third person, everything feels like it’s carved into stone. In first person, we suddenly get self-absorbed navel-gazing. The warning signs are when we start getting a great deal of personal trivia—the narrator’s experience of eating her first avocado, a meditation on the crash instruction manual in an airplane, a disquisition on how tragic it is that choroideremia hasn’t been cured yet. From there, it’s a short step to pretty much the entirety of the narrator’s reading list—we are treated to her opinions on Simone Weil, Gillian Rose, Ludwig Feuerbach, William Gass, and many more besides, which are also laid out in a “works consulted” section at the back of the book. And, then, as the warning signs compound, there’s the writer’s creeping voice of self-doubt as she realizes the book is starting to spiral (“we were looking for endings, but all we could find was more middle”) and a mad search for justifications as to why this kind of digressive pointlessness is defensible (“reality at large has never been my subject but interiority has been”).
So what’s going on exactly? Why is a writer capable of doing the things that Lacey does in the first part of the novel also writing this inertly? Upon further reflection, it probably isn’t really that she loses all sense of narrative discipline upon switching to first person, and it’s more that, not quite sure what to do with her book, she leans into a few of the ready-to-hand tools in the contemporary writer’s toolkit. That’s, first of all, autofiction, the presence of which seems to open the Knausgaardian floodgates, out of which stream reflections on avocados and flight safety manuals.
But the more important influence in Lacey’s case seems to be a certain arthouse style in which the form of the novel is broken down and flattened, opening a passageway into non-fiction. Some novels that are written this way end up being glorified Wikipedia entries; Lacey’s feels slightly more like submitting the source materials for a doctoral thesis that’s never actually going to get written. There’s some point being made here—that our contemporary lives are inextricably interwoven with what’s online, that the fictional world shouldn’t be entirely autonomous. Something like that.
At the same time, there’s a powerful urge within The Möbius Book to keep pushing us away from the things that anybody would normally care about—is there a murder going on next door or not?—and to drag us towards the abstract, the recursive, and the illumination of the trivial. When the door to the neighboring apartment is opened by the police at the end of the novel’s first half, it’s discovered that even the surviving inhabitant of the bloody scene has been in her own recursive loop—she’s been reading poetry to the dead man, somehow not noticing that anything is amiss with him.
It’s a perfect metaphor for the book as a whole. “As if it was urgent business I needed to take care of, I surrendered most of the day to this short, circuitous meditation on love and death and sex and longing,” the narrator tells us in the second half, and we are meant to take on this view of writing as “crying in public” without any other particular coherence to it. But once we accept that aesthetic impulse, we are left with just the wash of details, the beautiful images that may or may not matter, the tunneling ever deeper into the narrator’s interiority. We are told, for instance, that “it just happened that the Venetian red that dominated that famous painting [Matisse’s The Red Studio] is the red of my dreams.” Do we care about this? Do we care at all about the narrator of the novel’s second half, who really is just an assemblage of details exactly like this one?
Somewhere between Nathalie Sarraute and whatever Semiotext(e) is putting out at the moment, Lacey seems to have come to believe that stories are cheap, and pure writing is what matters. But stories are, in pretty classic Freudian terms, about sublimating one’s ego into something higher, something meaningful—about getting outside of oneself. Certain artists achieve this in unexpected directions, tunneling deep into the ego in order to somehow get past it (this seems, for instance, to be what Dante and Dostoevsky were up to). What an artist shouldn’t do, though, is to let her ego just spin out and endlessly glorify itself. That way lies being the barfly whom all the other barflies are afraid of being cornered into conversation with.
That, unfortunately, is what seems to have happened to the very talented Lacey. Something convinced her to give up on stories—almost literally at the halfway point of her book—and, without stories, in the realm of pure writing, there is nothing actually for the writer to do but preen and posture for the reader, until at some point the reader, finally beginning to sense that this is going nowhere at all, gives up out of sheer tedium.