... sometimes new works arrive, such as Eugene Lim’s strange, sinuous, highly memorable novel Search History that seem to herald some dawning technological epoch—one that might be called early posthumanism ... The fragmentary, asynchronous nature of Search History has roots in the avant-garde but also calls to mind the uncanny processes of artificial intelligence, which forge inexplicable connections and operate through weird skips in logic. It’s hard to tell, therefore, whether Mr. Lim is trying to disrupt expected narrative formulas or is anticipating the kind of machine-driven formulas that are on the horizon. A feeling of mournfulness accompanies these ambiguities. Discontinuity, one character points out, is always a reminder of death. It is the plangent (and often ruefully humorous) sense of loss saturating the novel’s contraptions that raise it from an academic exercise to a work of eerie and lasting power.

... out of this chaos emerges a vivid set of beings, beset by humanity’s common fears and passions, doubts and epiphanies, who also participate in a pulpish adventure interleaved with meditative moments ... This bricolage surprisingly coheres by the novel’s end into an authentic expression of a mind striving to comprehend the inexplicable cruelties of the universe and humanity’s most proper response ... Fans of Haruki Murakami’s melancholy, oneiric tales will also delight in Lim’s assault upon consensus reality. He encourages the reader to 'stop making sense,' in the Talking Heads manner, and experience the universe as a magical tapestry of events whose overall pattern is perceivable only by God — or maybe after one’s own death.

Lim’s novel, published earlier this year by Coffee House Press, proceeds by this logic, one that promises the disorientation of a house of mirrors. Some books aim to catalog their themes—to provide an accounting of the extent of loss or pain. This is useful in the cases where the existence of a thing remains contested; Claudia Rankine’s Citizen does this for the kinds of antiblack injustices suffered by a well-to-do Black person. But we do not need such a catalog—it would take no more than to watch the news or check the weather to understand the scope of our ongoing losses. Lim’s goal is more ambitious: not to be a cataloguer but to ask what genre of grief could ever serve as an adequate response. What language or gesture can respond to the scale of this loss? To its senselessness? ... Search History is contemporary, but it is the magic of a cassette tape that it would be virtually unplayable 'because then the cassette would become only a totem, some kind of emanating if impractical object.'

Anarchic in tone and structured like a Mobius strip, Search History is Lim’s fourth book to date, and the author’s best attempt yet to graft his discursive, esoteric ideas onto the rip-roaring action of genre fiction. There is a risk of flying too close to the sun; the wax that holds this story together is warm. This is especially apparent in the novel’s two prologues, which seem included less for the reader’s benefit than as some authorial throat-clearing. Here, the narrative is still molten ... One of the great jokes of the novel, and one I am certain Lim is in on, is the way that, on its surface, it seems to fail to cohere, composed of recognizable narrative forms that elbow disjointedly against one another. Just the sort of book an AI would write. The best compliment I can give Search History is that the great rewards of its reading come from the risks of its experimentalism; it is a success that sticks its landing quite close to failure ... And in his hands the MacGuffin, long since revealed as an insubstantial engine of plot, takes on a metaphysical heft.

The connective tissue of Search History’s multiple parts is of course art and identity but, more profoundly, grief and mourning the dead ... This ontological realization of needing to find self through another and the threat of its impossibility is a major crux of the book. While Search History is a novel of big ideas about the relationships between art and technology, self and society, it is also a novel about the most quintessential human experiences—that we will lose someone we love and be forced to rewrite the world in their absence.

Despite 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.

Lim is deeply aware of the literary territory he’s working ... Lim’s ability to balance the fantastical with the heartfelt is what ultimately makes this book resonate. It does cover a lot of seemingly random ground, but as the full shape of the narrative takes hold, it becomes thoroughly compelling ... Lim brings together the mundane and the extraordinary to powerful effect.

... elliptical, swirly ... The resulting novel is profound and casually bonkers, featuring a drift of photographs, screen grabs, and an eclectic lexicon of quotations from W.G. Sebald, David Byrne, and more that reveal the shuffled heritage of Lim’s distillation. This brilliant sui generis takes storytelling to new heights.