The Novel That Contains Itself: On Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book
A Möbius strip has no inside. Run your finger along its surface and you will return to where you started having never, technically, crossed an edge. When I first encountered the title of Catherine Lacey's new novel, The Möbius Book, I found myself thinking of that shape — not as metaphor, which is the easy thing, but as a structural problem. A novel that contains another novel is not unusual. A novel with no discernible outside might be something else.
Lacey, whose Biography of X was one of the most formally audacious novels to appear in recent years, has returned with a work that — according to early reviews — begins as something resembling a revenge narrative before folding into itself to reveal an embedded novella of a quite different, stranger character. The exact mechanics remain, by design, difficult to paraphrase. This is the point. A Möbius strip resists being unrolled.
What interests me about Lacey's work, more than the structural cleverness, is her relationship to discomfort. She does not write novels that explain themselves. Nobody Is Ever Missing was narrated by a woman who abandons her life for no clean reason; Biography of X constructed an entire fictional biography of an artist who might be a cipher. In both cases, Lacey's formal choices are not decoration — they are the argument. The way the book is built is what the book is saying.
I am reminded, reading about The Möbius Book, of the debates that surrounded Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel, that examination of how contemporary fiction folds the self back into itself. Lacey is not an autofictionist in any strict sense, but she is working with a similar question: what is the minimum structural intervention required to make a reader genuinely uncertain about what kind of story they are reading?
El Cultural's review describes the book as an act of revenge against an ex, with a mystery novelette folded inside. Whether that description is accurate or is itself part of the architecture, I cannot yet say. What I can say is that Catherine Lacey has not, in any of her previous books, settled for the obvious move. That the novel is called The Möbius Book and apparently contains a novella suggests she hasn't started now. The question that remains — as with any Möbius strip — is where, exactly, you are when you reach the end.
