Diane Awerbuck reviews Sarah Lotz’s ‘Impossible’

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“It reads like Nora Ephron and Ursula le Guin cracking each other up at the bar,” writes Diane Awerbuck of Sarah Lotz's new novel 'Impossible'

There’s a time and a place for everything, but for Nick and Bee’s emotional affair, this is not the era. Sarah Lotz’s new novel,is primarily a story about a love that cannot be acted on — but not for the usual reasons.

The two meet online by accident — Nick sends a caustic payment query to a client that mistakenly goes to Bee’s email address — and they fall into the kind of banter that in feel-good films often leads to love. “Sapiosexual” is the poncy word we use about feeling attracted to another person’s mind, but it’s all these two initially have. They make the most of it, until their intimate, jokey chat becomes the highlight of their days.-type complicated.

Lotz reminds us that it’s the capacity to play that keeps us with our friends or our partners — it’s what we mean when we talk about “the spark” that animates a satisfying connection. Though her hand is light, the other themes are heavy: how we deal with loneliness, displacement, intimacy, memory and experience inside our heads and with other people.

How does she do it? Every successive novel is fantastic — supremely clever but also terribly kind, and it’s a rare combination.is the consummation of these aspects of Lotz’s work, and it reads like Nora Ephron and Ursula le Guin cracking each other up at the bar. It tickles me to think of the mainstream readers who are getting a decent dose of science fiction, and liking the experience.

It’s all good sense, too, and an ode to the nice bits about being British. Lotz names the novel’s sections after romcoms , and there are constant pithy sideswipes from both main characters, but her main lesson is succinct and universal: Don’t wait. For everyone who’s ever felt that they’ve met The One but can’t be with them in the flesh, this book is your wedding song in a world where you aren’t only possible, you are destined to be together.

 

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