This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Catherine Lacey is one of America’s most interesting authors. Her debut novel Nobody is Ever Missing (2014) had a dreamy flatness that recalled the fiction — once modish, now modern classic — of Joan Didion or Bret Easton Ellis, retooled for a new generation. Her later fiction includes Pew (2020), a religious allegory that resists decoding and Biography of X (2023), an audacious novel masquerading as fact.
It’s the last of these that gives us an idea of what would come next. The Möbius Book advertises its innovation from the outside: it’s published in a back-to-back format, with two front covers, so you read one half, get to the middle and then turn the book upside down and start again. The format itself is not new, having been done by authors including Carol Shields (Happenstance) and Michelle de Kretser (Scary Monsters), and the idea of a “Möbius book” with no beginning or ending goes back as far as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
But Lacey’s departure from her predecessors is that one half of the book is fiction, and the other is fact. Each copyright page even has the relevant declaration: the “Any resemblance to actual events is entirely coincidental” disclaimer, versus “This is a work of nonfiction”.
The Möbius Book is an illustration of how writers process experience. Choosing at random, I read the fiction half first, which takes the form of a dialogue between two friends, Edie and Marie. Marie is about to leave her home (noticing a pool of blood seeping out from under a neighbour’s door) when Edie calls round: an old friend who had a “tendency to disappear for months on end, then show up as if she’d been there all along”.
They discuss their relationship problems. Edie is “fleeing from another man … a man she’d fled towards when fleeing yet another man, same chorus, different verse, same Edie, different year”. Marie, meanwhile, has broken up with her wife, had an affair with a woman named Helena and a mutual contact called K is referred to repeatedly.
All this, however, is cloudily delivered, to the extent that it’s often hard even to tell whether Edie or Marie is speaking at any given time. This is, no doubt, all part of Lacey’s intent, where identity is obscured beneath communal experiences.
But there is room for some comedy, as when Edie’s ex-partner, a photographer, gets K to ask her “if he can dedicate his self-portrait book to you”. Edie replies: “Tell him … it is extremely clear … to whom his self-portraits are actually dedicated.”
“There is no story that does not lead to another story,” we’re told, knowingly, near the end. Which brings us to the non-fiction part, an account — both more straightforward and more engaging than the fictional half — of Lacey’s own break-up with her partner, whom she refers to as “The Reason”.
It’s an acute, unsettling account of an experience which led to Lacey crying in public, though “you could make the argument that half, if not all, published writing is a form of crying in public”. She takes advice from her friends, including recognisably real people like the novelist Sarah Manguso, who says, “I’m not going to tell you that it will all be OK.” (We wouldn’t expect consolation from the author of the bleak novel Liars.)
From this half of the book, we learn that the cool, somewhat clinical style of Lacey’s earlier work seems to come not from her characters but from her own character. It’s a striking juxtaposition with the anguished content, yet it works. Lacey too is adept at subverting our expectations. Just as we’re ruminating on another account of an angry father figure — are all the men here angry? — she twists it with a report on her exasperation when a poem about angry men penned by a previous character of hers is assumed to be her own view: the simplistic reading of fiction that can be too prevalent today.
This is a book of doublings, pairings and contradictions, as frequently fascinating as it is occasionally maddening. “I hate writing fiction with the equal and opposite force of how much I love it,” Lacey writes. The Möbius Book is the outcome of that impulse.
What you don’t get from Lacey’s book is a sense of the wider world. “Reality at large has never been my subject, but interiority always has been.” If you want to understand how the world works now, read a classic. Honoré de Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes, first published in 1835 and newly translated, does just that, being both perfectly contemporaneous with its era and timeless in its understanding of social snakes and ladders.
The novel, like almost all of Balzac’s fiction, forms part of his Comédie humaine sequence, portraying French society in the first half of the 19th century. It opens with the general and settles down to the particular. The first pages are a torrent of satirical judgement on Parisian mores.
The typical Parisian, it says, “lives like a child. He complains of everything, tolerates everything, mocks everything, forgets everything, desires everything, tastes everything, feels everything passionately, drops everything casually.” The reason is because of modern man’s interest in two pursuits: “gold and pleasure”.
This may be a structural issue — “every cog falls into its groove and everything stimulates the upward progress of money” — but novels need people to represent their themes, and our protagonist Henri de Marsay is a rich and handsome young man who “was learning from the [other] fashionable young men of the time the art of running through an inheritance”.
With the boredom of wealth and finding “more gravel than pearls” in his innumerable conquests, Henri sets his sights on a young woman with “the eyes of a tiger; a gleaming yellow gold, a living gold, a thinking gold”. She is unattainable — or is she? There follows a seduction, which travels in both directions: for although she “was a virgin, she was certainly not innocent”.
The twists are too rich to recount here, but the story escalates beautifully with surprises for all, destructive passions of all kinds and there’s even room for a black joke in the final line. Like 19th-century engineers, they built stories to last back then.
There would be little argument that Canadian writer Mavis Gallant is one of the last century’s champion short story writers. But the problem for the newcomer has always been where to begin. A complete edition of the stories was never a possibility, Gallant acknowledged: “You wouldn’t be able to pick it up”. Even her carefully-whittled Collected Stories was a 900-page brick. Praise, then, to Pushkin Press, who have just produced a manageable 300-page selection under the title The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories.
The selection — by Tessa Hadley, no slouch herself in the short form — covers Gallant’s career, from the 1950s to 1990s, and in the first story, “In Italy”, we see her strengths fully present. Her characters are often high-minded but in reduced circumstances, such as Henry and Stella, notionally privileged to spend much of the year in Italy but nonetheless unsettled. “There are rats in the palms. They jump from tree to tree.”
Stella is Henry’s 30-years-younger second wife — she had turned down “a nice young man in chemicals”, feeling it was “better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave” — but she faces resistance from Henry’s daughter Peggy. The conclusion is both messy and neatly complex.
Also included is probably Gallant’s most anthologised story, “The Ice Wagon Coming down the Street”, about a couple recalling their “mysterious period of exile” in Switzerland (a common topic for Gallant, who lived in France most of her life). As always, she expertly tugs on her characters’ sensitivities and weaknesses for the reader’s entertainment. But they are never mere stooges; she balances empathy with a wry eye.
Amongst the later stories, we get two dispatches from the world of the Carette sisters: more reduced circumstances, as they live with their mother in 1930s Paris. On her uppers since her husband died, Mme Carette can at least save face to herself since moving to a smaller flat: “By walking a few extra minutes, [she] could patronise the same grocer and butcher as before.”
In another story, “The Chosen Husband”, both Carette daughters have man trouble. Berthe is bothered by a man at work: “Mr Macfarlane had left a lewd poem on her desk, then a note of apology, then a poem even worse than the first.” And Marie is being courted, though her mother is not happy with one suitor for his lack of ambition. “In the life of a penniless unmarried woman, there was no room for a man merely in love. He ought to have presented himself as something: Marie’s future.”
The downside of tight selection, of course, is what’s missing. (For one thing, Gallant wrote two other equally good Carette family stories.) But a Mavis Gallant story anyway is a meal, not a snack. Her short fictions have the amplitude, if not of a novel, at least of a novella, so they need to be taken slowly. The best guide to them is to quote Gallant herself. “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Come back later. Stories can wait.”
