Is this book a breakup memoir? A murder mystery? Both?
Almost two decades ago, while I was trying to find my footing as a writer — roving between the provinces of prose and poetry — I picked up “The Poetry Home Repair Manual” by Ted Kooser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2004 to 2006. In the years since, I’ve often pulled it down from my bookshelf to reread one line: “A carefully controlled metaphor, like any clearly observed association of two dissimilar things or events, can excite the responses of readers because it gives them a glimpse of an order that they might not otherwise have become aware of.”
Kooser elegantly renders a feeling I’d long possessed but could never adequately express. I’d always been attracted to metaphorical language precisely because it connects notions and images that seem entirely different, but I was especially drawn to Kooser’s idea that such “controlled” language could also offer readers a “glimpse of an order.” Successful metaphors don’t simply set up an association between two dissimilar things: They evoke a whole network of associations, a moving map that undergirds the very possibility of meaning, even when our immediate experiences teeter on the brink of meaninglessness.
This idea returned to me as I read Catherine Lacey’s latest work, “The Möbius Book.”Lacey’s book (it is being marketed as a work of fiction and memoir) is formally playful and quite ambitious, and relies on its physical form — that is, its material condition as a book that you can hold in your hands — to convey its separate tales: Begin from one side and you will encounter a story about a woman who discovers a pool of blood in the hallway leading to her apartment. Flip the book upside down and start from the opposite cover, and you will find a memoir in which Lacey recounts the dissolution of a long-term relationship. The title of this book is a reference to a mobius strip, a one-sided surface with no boundaries that resembles an infinite loop.
