The drama of the memoir side is most palpable in the moments when these purgings happen without conscious effort or warning ... The fiction, likewise, is deepened and intensified upon rereading...when we are compelled to imagine Lacey writing the text and arriving at such moments of spontaneous insight ... This demand that we grasp the text not just as a written thing...but also as a writing, as the product of a writer struggling with her material...is Lacey’s great breakthrough.
Readers should begin with the memoir: It is both better and makes better sense of the fictional part ... ... Apt ... For all its delightful circularity, The Möbius Book does approach a terminus of sorts.
The Möbius Book does not reject the idea of fiction so much as demonstrate how fiction and nonfiction are in constant dialogue, how each is never entirely what it says it is. ... It is equally a moving documentary of personal loss, a meditation on the fragility of identity and a critique of the struggle women still face in being heard.
Enticing and frustrating ... I read the novella first and found it occasionally over the top but largely exhilarating in its meticulous construction and literary flamboyance. Turning to the memoir and experiencing much of the same material in brief sections of rambling reflection was a bit of a letdown. Lacey’s account of her religious childhood and the impact of its loss is compelling and moving ... A book that conjoins fiction and memoir to tell different versions of the same story is one way to punk the punking and eschew an ending. But ultimately, its fiction still wins.
Lacey isn’t scorching earth—she’s sifting it, flinging fistfuls of dirt and thought at us ... Elliptical ... Their interlocked stories drip with aphorism...defy summary and might all be a fever dream anyway ... The Möbius Book invites the reader to consider the overlaps between its two parts, an exercise both frustrating...and exhilarating, because Lacey is imaginative and whimsical when considering reality, and sees truth in make-believe.
Playful and quite ambitious ... Excruciating and occasionally poignant detail ... By allowing both fiction and nonfiction to flirt with the unreal, Lacey demonstrates that they share the same ambition—the pursuit of truth—and suggests that our understanding of truth might need to expand to account for the strangeness and wildness of our lives.
Deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention ... The questions are constant, implicit, teasing, elaborated rather than answered in the dark mirror of life writing.
In style, the sections are different with one more successfully executed than the other. It is tempting, then, to write off this hybrid project as a gimmick or a larky homage to the mad textual experiments of BS Johnson, but it’s more intriguing than that ... Sadly, her meditations on faith feel too erratic to make this a serious work about religious belief in the modern age. Her confusion about God is more powerful when transmuted into fiction in the novella section ... The novella cleverly weaves together many of the loose strands of experience and thought from the memoir to create a work about betrayal, self-sabotage and rupture, which is more controlled and compelling ... Still, as flighty and self-indulgent as the memoir is, it is a useful behind-scenes companion piece to the novella ... The Möbius Book has its frustrations, but it’s a project that makes you think deeply.
For those of us who’ve lost faith in fiction at some point in our lives as writers or readers, Lacey’s highwire act of juxtaposition in The Möbius Book serves to rekindle our conviction in the value of its ability to reveal rather than to obscure the mysteries of human life ... Multifaceted and endlessly rewarding.
New insights from [various] characters keep the existential questioning fresh and provide some relief ... [The] New Age wackiness is disconcerting ... There is an attractive clarity in this reflection, and in many other considerations on the nature of writing included in the book ... A thought-provoking philosophical exercise ... Ultimately, the writer’s brutal honesty, playful language and the unexpected twists and turns she describes in her journey to make sense of herself and her art during a pivotal period of trauma, make this a book to be read with care.
A tricksy, compulsively readable meditation on desire ... The interest may be keenest among readers who recognise the literary cameos that float through the pages. But once you have read both parts...the structure generates broader intrigue ... As always with Lacey, the writing can sound solemn ... Vivid particulars...give way to grandstanding riffs ... Yet the material is incendiary enough to survive its mannered telling—maybe it says more about me than about the book, but the truth is that I found myself consuming both parts as avidly as I would the ugliest gossip. Ultimately, the cathartic indictment of The Möbius Book is what gives it special voltage as an aesthetic experiment. It feels brave, even dangerous: a project born of damage, capable of damaging in turn the one person you suspect will read it most closely.
As a novelist, Lacey is one of the most experimental, fascinating, boundary-pushing of her generation ... As a memoirist, Lacey also remembers every detail. She is an incredibly anecdotal writer.
A lissome philosophical experiment ... This potentially divisive work is sure to lure fans of high-brow and mesmerizing writing by R.O. Kwon and Sarah Manguso.
A category-defying, creative, thought-provoking piece of literature on loss, betrayal, friendships, faith, and more ... A sui generis work, like no other.
Half a weak novel and half a weak memoir, stuck together as if one might improve the other ... Corny ... Lacey sketches her characters too vaguely for either of them to say something precise.
Lacey’s details are interchangeable as boutique Legos. She takes this endless fungibility to its logical conclusion and replicates the details in her own repeating memory, and while the result is a brilliantly structured book, this also has the effect of ensuring that nothing new ever happens in it.
A tedious work of prose ... Baggy and vast ... The book, to me at least, is the memoir. The novella feels like ephemera ... Gimmicky ... It is so preoccupied with its conceptual project that it forgets to be funny. It is a humorless, completely self-serious book. It lacks the sense of playfulness that experimental prose demands in order to be legible. At its worst, it panders to us ... Exhausting to read ... I couldn’t help but feel like [the] references...exist to pad Lacey’s prose. To dazzle us without actually doing so. They take away from the book’s brutal emotional reality ... And this is what is actually dazzling about The Möbius Book,the moments when it does not speak in generalities about suffering and instead opts to be plain and specific ... The Möbius Book is at its best when Lacey dutifully transcribes these banal horrors. These are the moments I found the most truly heartbreaking.
Ambitious ... Lacey’s writing is at its most vital in the fiction section; the memoir skews trite ... Still, her vulnerable search for answers and insertion of rhyming resonances across the two narratives excite. The author’s fans will be glad they took the plunge.
