Catherine Lacey (1)

You know, I like a bleak book. I like introspection. And beautiful writing is important. Lacey’s first novel hit all these buttons but collapsed in the last third, pages lost in her head, still aimless, hardly having changed. Still, I look forward to the new Biography of X and more of her wry crackerjack characterizations and writing.

Can’t fault her writing, characterizations or the seductive bibliography to this novel. I just did not respond to the alternate U.S. history and associated constraints which form the basis of the story. I was more interested in the narrator than what she dug up on X.

Lyrical, literary, poetic. Sufficiently vague so as to allow reader to impose their own framework. Metaphorical.

Boring and pretentious. I found this to be not an interesting or engaging way of exploring the issues. DNF