As the computer Deep Thought pointed out in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s no good spending seven and a half million years working on the answer if you don’t start with a good idea of what the question is. Lacey’s second novel, the follow-up to 2015’s Nobody Is Ever Missing, opens with a full-scale assault on readerly curiosity: a female narrator wakes up in her own bed and then locks eyes, shockingly, with a woman called Ashley who is outside her window, staring in. The who, what and why are a powerful incentive to drive through the pages. But for the characters in The Answers, the thing they are looking for is always being deferred or displaced.
Mary, the woman whose bedroom we started out in, is looking for an answer to her pervasive, agonising and maybe psychosomatic health issues. When extensive medical investigations only add debt to her distress (because the novel is set in the US, where healthcare is a luxury), she feels as though “the use of my own body, the only thing I really owned, had somehow been repossessed”. The solution is an alternative and expensive therapy called PAKing – “Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia” – recommended by a hippy friend. Mary is well aware that allowing a man called Ed to hoik her about in her underwear for hours at a time might be quackery, but as it works, she reasons it’s worth paying for.
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