The Answers
Catherine Lacey
Granta
A beguiling and strange second novel by Catherine Lacey (Nobody is Ever Missing was the first), at face value The Answers satirises wellness culture and Silicon Valley’s use of emotional labour. Dig deeper, however, and the novel addresses the question of how a person should be, and how to love others while remaining ourselves.
Lonely, unrooted, bereft of money and friends, and dependent upon a peculiar alternative therapy known as PAK-ing, protagonist Mary chances across a job-cum-lifestyle experiment called “GX”, or “the Girlfriend Experiment”. Cast as one of several companions to a well-known actor, she will perform as the “emotional girlfriend”, with others cast as the “anger girlfriend,” “intellectual girlfriend”, “maternal girlfriend” and so on. What follows is a dissection of relationships, at once heartfelt and starkly clinical.
As she retraces steps learned from past love and from the team of research scientists who oversee her, Mary strains at the limits of mutual understanding and communication. Where can we put all the love we feel, our howling need for reciprocity, when the world makes those who love so vulnerable? “Such a serious thing we are doing,” Lacey writes, “and no one really knows how to do it.”
The Answers is a book about love and loneliness, intimacy and surveillance, certainty and uncertainty, faith and lack thereof. As any good book should, it will comfort anyone who has ever chafed inside their own body. It’s an anti-romance with a gently sci-fi edge, one which might easily pass as present-day fact.
Words – Roisin Kiberd
