Novelists Have Forgotten Narrative

Catherine Lacey is a writer of extraordinary gifts, with hard-earned adult wisdom and the kind of effortless sentence-to-sentence felicity that makes any writer reading her strongly consider pursuing alternate careers. Given the achievements of her first four novels, most famously her 2014 breakout Nobody Is Ever Missing, the failure of her latest, The Möbius Book—and it is unfortunately a failure—is probably best read less as an indictment of her writing and more as a case study for a broader diagnosis of what’s gone awry with contemporary literature.