Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel, Biography of X, which came out in 2023, is one of the most formally and intellectually interesting books of the decade so far. It’s an audacious, compelling collage of truth and invention, a story of a made-up artist that draws on bits of real artists’ lives in a biographic sense and repurposes them to fictional ends. It’s good enough to read over and over, searching for the line where reality crosses into imagination. When I learned that Lacey’s follow-up, The Möbius Book, would be a hybrid, genre-blurring text without a beginning or an end, my immediate thought was that maybe she had gotten herself on, or at least near, the level of Julio Cortázar’s canonic experimental novel Hopscotch, which can be read with its chapters in one of two suggested sequences or in any other order the reader likes.

Unfortunately, The Möbius Book isn’t anything like that. It’s hybrid only in the sense that the first part of the book is invented and the second is true, with the former starting inside the front cover and printed right-side up and the latter starting inside the back cover and printed upside down. The experience of twisting the book around to keep reading does, for a moment, make it resemble a Möbius strip, but The Möbius Book isn’t endless. It doesn’t even end without resolution. It’s just half a weak novel and half a weak memoir, stuck together as if one might improve the other.

The Möbius Book begins with an unmistakable beginning: “Edie’s on the line, says she’s coming over, says it’s urgent, no context.” In a sentence, Lacey at once creates mystery—who is Edie, and what’s going on that’s so urgent?—and promises to resolve it, which she does, more swiftly than she might have in a full-length novel. Edie is the protagonist’s best friend, and what’s urgent is that the protagonist, recently divorced from her wife and estranged from their twins, is alone on Christmas. Edie too is freshly single, having just left an emotionally abusive boyfriend, but she’s enjoying the change much more than the protagonist, whose name is Marie, or at least........

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