Catherine Lacey, The Answers *** 1/2

Mary Parsons suffers from an unknown full-body illness that resists treatment until she tries Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia (PAKing). To pay for the expensive treatments, she finds a second job as part of a social science Girlfriend Experiment: a team of researchers divide up the various roles of a girlfriend (emotional support, mundane day-to-day tasks, maternal assistance, fights) among different women and measure the participants responses to learn how to build the perfect relationship. Mary is the Emotional Girlfriend, even though her emotional responses are somewhat odd due to her strange parents.

I appreciated that The Answers doesn't have a typical structure and that it asks big questions about who we are and what we want from relationships. However, I felt like there was too much going on, too many unusual situations without a realistic platform to view it from. Every character and every story strand was off-kilter, so it was hard to think about the real-world implications of its ideas. Some of its ideas were intriguing, though ("Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person").

I might take another crack at this book in a few years to see whether it fits together when I look at it from a different angle.

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo **** 1/2

I actually listened to Lincoln in the Bardo, rather than read it. The story is narrated collectively by over 150 characters, so the audiobook seems like a more natural way to experience it. Hearing the different readers helped provide distinct personalities for each character, not to mention adding emotional color to the old-fashioned diction.

Lincoln in the Bardo takes place the night after Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie is buried. President Lincoln uses the prerogative of his office to get back into the cemetery after dark, to mourn alone. But he's not alone, because a variety of spirits live there and witness his unprecedented visit. They narrate the story while also telling us their own stories. It's an innovative and unusual structure, leading to review headlines like this one.

Saunders captures the tone in the very first chapters. The most prominent spirit, Hans Vollman (Nick Offerman in the audiobook), describes how he married a much younger woman, treated her with great tenderness, and was about to consummate the marriage when he "fell sick" from a ceiling beam to the head. He has been waiting ever since in his "sick box," which he reluctantly admits that he pooped in when he first arrived here. His narration is old-fashioned, compassionate, and just a little bit silly.

The book addresses big subjects like the meaning of life and death, and builds its own cosmology from an amalgam of Buddhist and Christian ideas. (The bardo is a Buddhist concept; one of the lead spirits is a minister.) The fancy structure distances us enough that Saunders can show us the most extreme emotions without tipping into melodrama.

His mind was freshly inclined to sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in the world one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content, all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities **

I picked up Imaginary Cities based on a year-end recommendation from the A.V. Club. I expected it to describe imaginary cities (from Atlantis and Xanadu to Metropolis and New Crobuzon from Perdido Street Station) and examine what their construction tells us about our attitudes towards real cities. I hoped it might also compare purely fictional world-building to the literary presentation of "real" cities like Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul or The Third Man's Vienna.

Unfortunately, Imaginary Cities takes a different approach. Anderson writes in an epigrammatic style that moves (too) quickly from point to point while tossing out unattributed references to high and low culture. It feels like Anderson is trying to disguise his jejune observations with a thicket of allusions and lit-crit theory to make them seem profound.

"Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear!" wrote François Villon, the finest poet ever to have killed a priest in a knife fight...

The control of space and those within it is crucial to dystopias. The manual for tyranny is essentially a guide to the manipulation of architecture. 

A disappointing start to 2018. On the plus side, I did learn about the existence of hoboglyphs.