There's a sweet turn in this short but potent novel (the book clocks in around 150 pages, a brevity I personally aspire to but keep failing to achieve) about two-thirds of the way through that I won't ruin for you, but which totally transforms your understanding of the story. Even reading these sentences of me telling you that it's coming will likely pass from your mind if you are as entranced by this book as I am, so I don't feel bad about it, though obviously I'm not a big enough dick to tell you what it is.

I mean the writing takes me in nicely:

Back at the cottage, it's very quiet. Lisa is upstairs, in the bedroom or the underproportioned turret, probably working on her new play. This is one of the last happy days I remember, before the catastrophe of the Lisa 2 computer and the genre switch to what Lisa would come to call notional horror, an obscure term that I tried to tell her would never catch on.

The sentences are sharp but not showy; the sort of skating from thought to thought that our narrator does serves to characterize him nicely. They give us a bit of the motion of thought which is what the first-person narrator is for, at least for me. Sentences like these, not like page-long clausetastic slogs, but a little fun extending of grammar, pull us along in time and bring us, or obviously I mean me and I hopefully mean you, closer to the consciousness we see on the page.

But I'm not just talking about the writing. The book itself, like many Calamari Press jams [link to SSES SSES etc], takes some liberties with the book design. It's got a glitchy, retro-tech feeling occasionally verging into vaguely eldritch or at least more than a little diagrammy:

This is all a little dislocating in a very positive way. We're akilter, as we often are with Calamari books, but the akilterness serves a different purpose here: it keeps us a little uneasy, so we're not quite sure what is happening (physically on the page as we encounter this stuff), so it doesn't fully resolve, and so I read on.

But what really gets me are the spreads where we see stills from films:

and we may not recognize them at first, but they show up in the narration pretty quickly (the first is from Chopping Mall and the second is from At Land). Neither seem like real films, to be frank, and this is part of the magic of the book, that moment of thinking what if, like is it all a fiction, except I am aware of Chopping Mall, so it resovles, though because I do not know At Land, it does not). That these are real films (I think?! I am not looking this up) adds to our ability to read this as maybe a little truer, a little more autobiographical. And it brings me as a viewer a touch closer to the narrator. Again, this is important because we're going to have to rethink some things we have come to believe later. There are a lot of films, some seen in screenshots, a little glitched, maybe, and some just used as reference points. It's not necessary to know them, though, and the more or less you know them the more our readings may diverge, since there's a lot of this kind of slippage happening.

Lisa 2.0 plays with the slippage between art and life a lot: Lisa (the wife) is writing plays about people from her real life ("you mean your friend Julia, or Julia in the play? I ask"), and weird things keep happening on every level, from the observed world, to the play, to the house, even the very computer Lisa is writing on (the Apple Lisa, which is where we get the title, Lisa writing on the Lisa and that doing something to her, or perhaps the reverse), and our narrator's life gets weirder the deeper we go: his mysterious and highly-paid line of work is doing "reiterations" in which clients pay to have significant moments in their pasts changed, or is it memories of significant moments in their pasts? Like everything else in the book, this appealing sci-fi idea is treated lightly, and contributes to all the layers and iterations that accumulate throughout the book.

Anomalies happen, and they keep increasing in intensity until we're not exactly sure what is real and what is not, and then, boom, that thing I mentioned before happens and the book takes a big old swerve in which we come to understand the story in a very different way. (The visuals start to get weirder the deeper we go and crest at the same time.) It's a great trick. I love books that pull us as readers slowly into more and more uncomfortable positions and then strand us there, and we must then have to look at ourselves and how far we've come or gone, betraying what assumptions and principles, and Nicholas Rombes's Lisa 2.0 does just that.

It doesn't hurt that this book takes place in Michigan which is only maybe a real state. But I think for now I've said enough. You should go experience Lisa 2.0 for yourself. You already know that this book is for you (or if not, see you in the next review). There's a lot of awful bullshit out there in the world, so I think it's even more important than it always has been to acknowledge and seek out those making space for weird art and making weird art themselves, so thanks Nicholas Rombes and Calamari Press for this one.