PositiveThe RumpusDespite the grief that permeates the book, Lim’s writing is playful—not light, exactly, but suave, full of plays on words and sly, satirical jabs, often about the literary world and the \'so-called literature\' that sells well and wins prizes ... Search History certainly defies plot; even the sections that appear to fall into a recognizable action genre have no arc or traditional story structure ... What’s more, by my reading the novel seems to defy linear time. Like a temporal Mobius strip, some sections appear to rely on technology that, based on the timeline of other sections, hasn’t yet been invented—definitely one way to \'break\' a story. It feels too obvious and underbaked to claim that the \'point\' of this broken form is, at least partly, to demonstrate the nonsensical and nonlinear nature of grief—but the fact is that Search History is a beautiful portrait of loss, and it is made all the more so, perhaps surprisingly, by its metafictional cleverness ... In the face of such cruelty and despair, most of the characters—like most people—are groping along, motivated by love for their friends and family, saddened by loss but trying not to let it overtake them. They mourn, they make art, they create technology to talk to the dead, they do drugs, they go to clown school, they joke around over sushi, they pose existential questions about their identity and the future. This is a book of conversation, but it’s not dialectical: no one is really helping their interlocutors come to any universal conclusions.
