Purchase a copy for yourself here!
The Need is a genre-bending psychological thriller/family drama/speculative fiction novel that has been receiving rave reviews for its portrayal of the chaos surrounding identity and parenthood. The novel centers on Molly, a mother of two young children whose life seems to revolve around anticipating the needs of her children. In her professional life Molly doubles as a paleobotanist who specializes in plant fossils. Molly’s chaotic personal life is put on pause in the twenty foot pit that she spends her days digging through, “hoping that someday it would all fall into place. Nonsense converting, wondrously, to sense.” Molly’s enclave of peace is shattered when her and her colleagues begin discovering mysterious artifacts in the pit, like a coca-cola bottle with backwards script, or most notably, a Bible that is in every way the same as a Christian bible, except God is referred to with female pronouns.
The first few chapters of the novel read like a classic thriller, Molly’s husband is away on business when Molly and her children are woken up by an intruder in the home. Molly is at first suspicious of the existence of the intruder, as she describes suffering from delusions and brief hallucinations since the birth of her daughter, which her husband attributes to exhaustion. However, it becomes clear that the intruder is indeed real when she finally confronts Molly. This is where the speculative fiction element comes into play and the novel really starts to develop layers: the intruder is identical to Molly and knows everything about her life. This new Molly comes from another dimension, possibly the one where the Coke bottle and Bible are from, and the catch is that in this alternate dimension, Molly’s children are dead. This alternate Molly, called Moll, has travelled to Molly’s dimension in the hopes that she can share these living children with Molly. Molly and Moll then actually begin the engagement precariously, sharing time with the kids who cannot tell them apart, and both of their psyches unravel as they begin to question their identities and selfhood in relation to their children, which actually turns out to be quite a tenuous separation.
While the premise of this novel felt promising for me in terms of both entertainment value and philosophical provocation, something about this novel really did not work for me. I don’t know if its because I’ve never been a parent, but I had a really hard time with understanding Molly’s anxiety toward her children, and actually felt pretty uncomfortable in an unpleasant way for most of the novel. The situation was so unrelentingly awful, as the kids were often unpleasant, and Molly was so often anxious to the point of debilitation, that I often yearned to put this book down and was reluctant to pick it back up. While Molly’s strange fascination and intimacy with her other self was a deeply interesting premise, the novel never really came all the way around to synthesizing its thoughts on the matter or even presenting any meaningful explorations of its central questions. It honestly felt quite haphazard to me in terms of its plotting, and I just couldn’t find any point of connection with it. Again, this novel received rave reviews, so my non-parent status could be what’s tripping me up with this one, but this novel felt uniquely unpleasant and uninteresting to this reader.