Certain American States

June 1, 2018
In Lacey's (The Answers, 2017) collection of 12 wryly devastating stories, everyone is searching for something, and the cruel truth is that no one ever finds it.Everyone in Lacey's stories is losing something or has lost something, and they are brittle with the ordinary pain of grief. In "Please Take," a recent widow dumps her dead husband's clothes out onto the sidewalk. "The memory had to go and the shirt had to go, just as days and people had also gone, just as so many tangible and intangible things enter and exit a life," she thinks. Later, sitting on a bench in the park--a habit, because "habits were helpful, someone told me"--she sees the clothes reanimated, the shirt that had to go now on a stranger. In "Learning," an artist with a difficult marriage and a job teaching angry law students watercolor reconnects by chance with a guy from college. Then, he'd had what he called a "lying problem"; now, he's a Christian dad/blogger with a "highly trafficked" website called The Grateful Dad. In "Touching People," an older widow takes a pair of newlyweds to visit her ex-husband's grave; "Certain American States" follows a woman to the deathbed of the man who reluctantly raised her and from whom she's been estranged. In "Family Physics," the penultimate story in the collection, a woman whose life appears to her family to be unraveling--"in the last three months, I'd gotten married, filed for divorce, moved several times, quit my job, and driven to Montana, where I began working in a grocery store, stocking beans," she explains--receives a visit from her younger sister, who is now engaged to a much-older man. There is a bleak and relentless sameness to the stories; the tone is so consistent, it is occasionally disorienting, and to read the collection all at once is like driving through an emotional Great Plains. But on a sentence level, the stories are exquisite: Every line is dry and spare and bracing, without a single syllable out of place.A fully realized vision.

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June 11, 2018
Lacey explores the effects of solitude and the strains of relationships in her stellar first story collection (after novels Nobody Is Ever Missing and The Answers). “Violations” gives readers a neurotic ex-husband looking for himself in his ex-wife’s fiction. In “ur heck box,” a mother living in Texas complicates her adult daughter’s life when she moves to New York. The title story chronicles a woman’s difficult relationship with the godfather who raised her. These stories of modern complexity and nearly Dickensian emotional heft go on to incorporate the stress of dealing with stray dogs (“Because You Have To”), a widow trying belatedly to divest herself of her husband’s clothes (“Please Take”), an adjunct art teacher and her apathetic students (“Learning”), a depressed and impulsive woman’s attempts to meet her family’s expectations (“Family Physics”), and even a life laid bare through the device of an internet quiz (“The Four Immeasurables and Twenty New Immeasurables”). On display is Lacey’s trademark handle on the plight of characters who feel lost in their own lives, as well as her ability to enter the minds of her harried protagonists, making this collection a strong new showcase for her fiction.

July 1, 2018
Named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, Lacey (author of The Answers, 2017, and the Whiting Award-winning Nobody Is Ever Missing, 2014) continues to showcase her literary prowess in her first collection of short stories. Her characters search for something extraordinary in their lives but fail to be anything but ordinary. A woman deals with the emotional trauma of her breakup as uncontrollable chaos ensues around her. A man can't stop wondering whether the short story his ex-wife wrote is about the two of them. In New York, a young woman adjusts to living with her mother and overcoming a family tragedy but is disturbed by a mute man who shows her incoherent messages on his phone. An orphaned young woman visits her surrogate father, who had abandoned her during her teenage years, in the hospital, where they find common ground in fantasy. Readers will be drawn to Lacey's rhythmic, reflective prose and the stories she tells, which are filled with affecting emotional complexity just at the point of bursting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2018

A Granta Best of Young American Novelists whose Nobody Is Ever Missing was an NYPL Young Lions finalist, Lacey delivers an accomplished collection featuring characters suffering a sense of dislocation, as if they've just been pushed off a cliff. A man worried that his former wife will portray him badly in her writing stumbles when he confronts her; a woman who's moved to New York from Texas cannot regain her traction when her beloved brother dies and further fails to connect with her mother, her discomfort reflected in her inability to understand what a homeless man is trying to say. A sense of helpless solitude permeates the stories, as when a woman agrees to cat-sit for a man with whom she has little in common. Even the cat doesn't like her, and cats, dogs, and other animals show up throughout to highlight human failings. Lacey is a fluid writer whose stylistic choices expertly reflect her characters' state of mind; the endless sentences articulated by the man fearing his ex-wife's retaliation bespeak a sort of breathless anxiety; elsewhere, parentheses within parentheses embody the constant asides of someone who cannot speak her mind. VERDICT Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/12/18.]

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2018

A Granta Best of Young American Novelists and Whiting Award winner whose Nobody Is Ever Missing was an NYPL Young Lions finalist, Lacey here turns out a collection of short stories whose protagonists find their sense of finally having found their place in the world suddenly upended, as when a woman who's left her dead husband's clothes on the street sees another man wearing them.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.