The reason for writing takes on in Catherine Lacey a parabolic dimension extended in each scene of her novels. Always from a transformative notion of reality, of the closest plot of our world.
Because each protagonist of Lacey's works invokes us as if from other planes of what could be, from the moment in which, through a turning point, our lives or the way of understanding existence could change. Resilience in the face of misfortune or decision-making capacity to escape centripetal forces, whatever it takes.
Of course, from fiction, such a mission, narrative horizon or company has to be approached with an ingenious set design that can place us in the most recognizable territories of our daily life. Because only then can everything finally blow up.
Lacey's stories blow up principles and conventions. And only the protagonists of it are capable of taking the matter as a necessary controlled explosion in the face of circumstances and social "obligations" understood as conventions and formalisms.
Current novels that serve as self-help to consider any type of challenge. If Catherine Lacey's characters, so vivid and true, can bear the weight of the new world on their backs, why not all of them to end up reconstructing reality...
Top 3 Recommended Catherine Lacey Novels
Altar
We worship God above all things. Waiting to be able to achieve the benefits promised forever. Conscience wants it, tries it, but ends up facing powerful prejudices like temptations from the devil himself. Men and women full of faith wander through this work where pettiness ends up triumphing hidden in tepid excuses.
A person arrives in a small town in the United States. The locals find her sleeping on a pew in the church, where she has taken refuge for the night. It is impossible to tell her race, her age or her sex, and although she understands the language spoken to her, she refuses to utter a word or tell her story.
The local community, united by a strong religious faith, is willing to welcome her and give her the name Altar, but in the six days that follow, leading up to the mysterious Festival of Forgiveness, her presence ends up exposing the deepest fears and hypocrisies of the congregation. Lacey has created a hypnotic fable that asks us urgent questions about our identity, our body and our capacity for understanding: a disturbing and essential novel.
The answers
Living together is always an experiment. The coexistence between those formerly in love always moves through different phases of an unpredictable cycle. Getting to see the couple as a stranger is not something so strange (worth the bray). The best of the initial self in love parks its defects, perhaps even its vices, and offers the best of itself. The effervescence of the physical continues for a while. Everything conspires so that reality is transformed, for better or for worse, but never maintaining its original sensation.
The transformation of love, its magical or tragic mutation (depending on how you look at it) is an emotional process that escapes all science or prior estimation. And from there this book begins, it is about making love science, empiricism. Reach the knowledge of the last frontier beyond love.
Mary, a woman at a personal crossroads, decides to access a unique job under the enigmatic umbrella of "Girlfriend Experiment." Mary takes on her role as an emotional girlfriend, compensated by other women assigned complementary roles.
The other side of the relationship is Kurt, an all-around actor looking for answers to his own failures. Mary and Kurt hit it off, perhaps both sheltered in their latency of love in any manifestation. Until it ends up manifesting itself between them.
They may be close, both Mary and the other girls, like Kurt, to glimpse the ins and outs of love, its transitions and its most traumatic losses. And they will discover nuances of love that appear in the novel submerged among contradictory sensations of the very nature of the experiment, turned into a hyper-realistic or dreamlike experience.
Answers to the matter? Perhaps not as many as we expected or perhaps all of them for the reader capable of reading between the lines, capable of deciphering symbols and empathizing, of blending into the processes experienced by Mary or Kurt. The feminist perspective of the matter is also a noteworthy nuance. Is love lived differently in men and women due to external conditions?
Knowledge of the other and of oneself at the time of falling in love may be the key. Discovering what we are at the beginning of a flirtation will not avoid the transience of the passionate, but perhaps it will prevent false dreams or fatuous hopes. And humor, we also find the humor of our emotional miseries as beings exposed to emotional ups and downs.
A complete novel about love approached far beyond the romantic genre to reach an existential point. Because really existing without love is completely unfeasible.
no one is ever missing
The moment in which one decides to mutate their skin, to become who they always wanted to be or at least to simply escape from skin laden with furrows like channels of years drawn towards what is expected of one. No one is missing to be fulfilled if fears are overcome. After all, there is only one chance to meet again...
Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abandoning her stable but unfulfilling life in New York. As her husband desperately tries to understand what has happened, Elyria tests her destiny by riding in strangers' cars, sleeping in fields, forests and parks, and having risky, often surreal encounters.
As she ventures into the New Zealand wilderness, the memory of her sister's death haunts her and a hidden violence grows inside her, even though those who know her don't perceive anything strange. This paradox leads her to another obsession: if her true self is invisible and unknown to the rest of the world, can she tell that she is really alive?
