PositiveBookforumA dull, nagging alienation infuses every word. Margot’s lack of feeling informs what it feels like to read the prose, where pain always occurs with enough remove for it to be, as the novel’s title suggests, interesting ... This quality of distance—distance from sensation and experience, from self and others—manifests most effectively when characters are talking; no one writes dialogue quite like LaCava ... many interactions read more like abstract collages of communication than everyday conversations. She achieves this effect by having her characters, who are usually smart, aloof, and a little snarky, speak in subtly dissonant cadences, a little out of rhythm with each other. Their exchanges are rarely linear and are punctuated with non sequiturs. This can be disorienting, especially if there are more than two voices in a scene, but it can also create an acute sense of miscommunication, as if characters aren’t in dialogue exactly, but parallel monologue. LaCava is at her dexterous best when writing people trying—and often failing—to connect.
