Your Next Summer Read Is A Novel About Lonely People Grasping For Connections

It should feel like too much to smash together a book about undiagnosable illnesses and New Age alternative remedies with a book about a New Age relationship experiment run by a narcissistic celebrity with a book about the dehumanizing gig economy with a book about growing up under Voluntaryist religious fundamentalism. The genius of Catherine Lacey lies in the fact that her new book, The Answers, doesn’t feel like too much; the pieces are bizarre and timely and fit together like puzzle pieces into a somehow timeless examination of humanity.

Lacey’s heroine has been backed into a corner. Raised by fundamentalist Christians in a rural home, she had no official documents or real contact with the outside culture until she left home as a teenager and moved in with an aunt, who renamed her from “Junia” to “Mary.” Now in New York, she’s drifted out of touch with her family. She has one dear friend, who has left on a mysterious quest of self-fulfillment. She has a job at a travel agency that barely keeps the lights on. And she has a mysterious, debilitating illness with no diagnosis. She sees doctors and specialists as her symptoms shift and worsen, but no one can put a finger on the root cause. Finally, she’s found a treatment that works ― PAKing, an alternative therapy that seems similar to reiki ― but that demands significant out-of-pocket expenditures.