Poignant, filler-less ... The analgesia theme is treated subtly; it doesn’t flatten the characters or overtake the realism. In fact, my favorite aspect of the book was the careful, realistic telling of familial and romantic relationships. The calmly wrought dialogue and lifelike interactions were unexpected and ambiguous to the point of seeming documentarian. I believed it all really happened ... LaCava’s taut, sheared prose often seems like lines of poetry collapsed into paragraphs. This quality is enhanced by recurring words, images and ideas ... Meticulously constructed, with each part supporting and supported by the others. Controlled self-awareness like this in novels makes me pay close attention, enriching my experience ... The only thing that broke the spell for me was the last three sentences. I didn’t understand what they meant until three-quarters of the way into my second read of the novel, which seems OK, even ideal, since LaCava’s novel is substantial, heartfelt and concise enough to be worth reading more than once.

It’s a familiar story, but...Stephanie LaCava exploits the trope as a shortcut to intimacy between reader and character ... Examines issues of power, how it is or is not inherited, what the consequences of being defined by others are, and the ways pain shapes us.

A cool, cutthroat razor of a novel ... In places, an acerbic comedy so pitch-black barely any light escapes ... We are left with something more ambiguous, an act of violation and then a concluding line that I interpreted entirely differently each time I read the novel, neither option feeling like a happy ending ... In a curious way, the book, in spite of its absence of pain, is a paean to sensation, its usefulness and its vividness.

The inability to feel pain becomes an (only slightly clunky) metaphor for the way money coddles its owners ... Much of what follows is predictable — drug use, bad sexual decisions, disordered eating — but it is funny in its grotesqueries and sharp in its observations, allowing LaCava to transcend the familiarity of her subject matter ... With a character who can’t feel pain, but also can’t learn, there can be no traditional plot, no arc, just disconnected misadventures. In another’s hands this might seem tedious, in LaCava’s, it grows in tension as the unfelt wounds cut deeper ... is at its best when it is focused not solely on Margot but on the machinery around her. LaCava has a keen understanding of what fame, acclaim, and respect will get you, and how sometimes these things overlap and at other times do not ... LaCava’s messy but anorexic prose can be stunning. There is no fussiness, just bones jutting from skin...But often the jarring flashbacks and jumps in time feel less like a stylistic choice and more an attempt to hide an unevenness in the work ... LaCava makes this desire to see the privileged bleed literal, but that doesn’t diminish its power. I Fear My Pain Interests You is slim but satisfying, with LaCava as our talented chef who won’t let us forget whose bones we’re gnawing on.

A 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.

Margot is...hard to grasp because LaCava’s writing is so economical and spare. Or maybe Margot can’t be grasped so LaCava must be dispassionate. Much is withheld, which can make for elegance but also iciness. It’s hard to know how to feel about I Fear My Pain Interests You. Very few of the sentences are gripping, but then why keep reading? Is Margot interesting because she lacks pain or despite that?

Margot’s tale is tonally agile – wryly comic, breathlessly dark – while its characters have a translucency, an insistence that they’re never not artificial things ... This is therefore both a story of narcotised loneliness, to be shelved near Ottessa Moshfegh’s, and a superb aesthetic game with our contemporary love of surfaces. Like JG Ballard and David Cronenberg, LaCava has an interest in consumer objects and vulnerable flesh ... LaCava’s novel is full of such observations: dispassionate remarks on human passions at their worst. It’s sinister, revolting – and uncannily elegant.

Slim, stylish, occasionally self-indulgent ... The novel has an ambience of desultory glamour. Plot, insofar as it exists, isn’t really the point ... Privilege and numbness are familiar literary themes – particularly brilliantly examples include the mid-century novels of Alberto Moravia and Curzio Malaparte – but LaCava’s treatment is more interior and nuanced than most contemporary caricatures of the poor little rich girl ... The denouement is an act of violence captured on camera. For a novel so concerned with interiority and affect, anhedonia and nihilism, it is a dramatic departure: a moment of reality that shatters the frame – and fulfils the promise of the title.

The book is seeded with references to jazz music and to body-horror French arthouse film, and these frame LaCava’s attempt to do something transformative with violence and suffering...But its problem, as a novel, is that it just doesn’t seem very interested in being a novel. LaCava is cultivating a narrative experience of emptiness. There are allusions to numbness, negation and detachment. Everything is performance or reproduction. Relationships are explicated before they arise or long after they have ended but they rarely come to life on the page. Action is often deferred, conditional or continuous and conversation blank ... The banality here is purposeful – it’s how Margot converses with her father – but the words themselves just don’t land....Events, characters, and descriptions, all have that hollow feel ... Any of this could be interesting. The vacated characters and mannered dialogue; the rejection of current literary preferences for direct action, for proportionate structure, for a payoff for every setup – these things could be what makes this book distinct, if they were brought to a consistency or force that would invite attention. But LaCava doesn’t seem to want to make it hurt.

Sharp if uneven ... While LaCava is a funny and astute observer...a high-stakes turn involving Margot’s blurry arrangement with Graves fails to come together. Though it ultimately frustrates, LaCava gets plenty of mileage out of her protagonist’s small dramas.