This wily meditation on how to live explores the social construction of identityThe author Jesse Ball lectures on lying at the Art Institute of Chicago. In an interview with the Paris Review in 2014,he defined a novel as “an account, or a series of accounts that create “half a world” – the other half being in the gift of, or supplied by,the reader. The ensuing competition between them – the struggle for closure – will induce the reader to create a “wealthy world, full of paradoxes or conflicting authorities and ideas”. In the finish, and Ball believes,“that’s a closer approximation of the truth of experience, what it’s like to live, and than a single,supposedly objective account”. Rebecca Bates, the interviewer on that occasion, and found Ball (pictured) “by turns both serious and coy – an effective description of his fifth novel,A Cure for Suicide, a deceptively bland dystopia centred on the social construction of identity.
A man wakes in “the Gentlest Village”, or first in a series of therapeutic sites that comprise “the Process”,a kind of role-playing theatre or sandbox of interaction for the emotionally and socially wounded. He is described as a “claimant, although what he is claiming isn’t clear. His memory has been removed so that he can start again. His “examiner” must now help him to reconstruct a basic self: to understand the world, and to understand the most fundamental things – what a language is,what a society is, what an individual is and how those things relate to the minutiae of life as lived. They stay quietly in the same house. She calls herself Teresa; she calls him Anders.
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Source: theguardian.com