In Catherine Lacey's ambitious second novel we are introduced to Mary, a young woman living in New York City and struggling to cope with a body that has betrayed her. All but paralyzed with pain, Mary seeks relief from a New Agey treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, PAKing for short. And, remarkably, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive and Mary is dead broke. So she scours Craigslist for fast-cash jobs and finds herself applying for the "Girlfriend Experiment," the brainchild of an eccentric and narcissistic actor, Kurt Sky, who is determined to find the perfect relationship-even if that means paying different women to fulfill distinctive roles. Mary is hired as the "Emotional Girlfriend"-certainly better than the "Anger Girlfriend" or the "Maternal Girlfriend"-and is pulled into Kurt's ego-driven and messy attempt at human connection. Told in her signature spiraling prose, The Answers is full of the singular yet universal insights readers have come to expect from Lacey. It is a gorgeous hybrid of the plot- and the idea-driven novel that will leave you reeling.

The Answers is one of these books that has all the right elements to be great, but just falls slightly short in the execution to be a brilliant work. At the heart of Lacey's novel is the question of how much we can control our emotions and our pain -- Mary enters the experiment to pay for an expensive, mystical, and very likely placebo treatment for pain; The Girlfriend Experiment is Kurt's attempt to create the perfect relationship by dividing the girlfriend roles up to several women who can each perform only their specialized function for him; the researchers want to learn to inject feelings into people -- and the heavily symbolic plot is a good idea through which to explore it. The subtext of the misogyny of Kurt's experiment is palpable and develops interestingly, and Kurt as a character is appropriately oblivious and arrogant about it. The fact that the book asks the women in the experiment to perform in certain ways while their internal lives remain different from their roles is a very rich territory. The problem is that Lacey doesn't deliver these ideas with the complexity that they deserve. Both Mary (the main character and Emotional Girlfriend) and Ashley (the Angry Girlfriend) get developed arcs, but they end in somewhat simple ways, Ashley getting obsessive and violent and Mary finding herself after the experiment. Given such a charged and aggressive take on misogyny, why couldn't Lacey go darker or more ambivalently with the resolution? If Mary's feelings are constantly being messed with, shouldn't everything in her be more suspect? Isn't the whole novel setting itself up to be a mindfuck where Mary has no idea what's going on? It just seemed a bit easy and a bit weak to have the novel conclude with a return to normalcy, and we all wanted Lacey to go further with the concept she had. In terms of writing, there was a similar lack of ambition. It wasn't badly written, but the novel lacked the power of other gender-focused books (The Blazing World, Fates and Furies) we've read before. Ultimately, NUBClub found The Answers to be a work of unfulfilled potential. There are some good ideas, but alas The Answers aren't as good as the questions promise here.