Binary Star, the 2015 debut novel by Sarah Gerard is a lot like a few novels I have been coming across in the past few years, novels about women on the edge, written in sporadic, aggressive styles that talk liberally and openly about sex, addiction and the waning search for happiness and fulfillment in modern life. Some are really good and rise above their stylistic shortcomings, such as Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back and more recently Weike Wang’s Chemistry. None of them have been bad, but a significant few are underwhelming and of a repetitive and tiring nature, like Jade Sharma’s Problems and this one, unfortunately, a book made up of some rather interesting and staggering metaphors that made me think deeply about drastically troubled people as well as directly conveyed scenes that slip past profundity and into overbearing, sometimes laughable melodrama. Like many books such as this, the narrator is left unnamed, but we find out through a brief few sections at the beginning is that she suffers from a severe form of bulimia and weighs under 100 pounds. The bulk of the novel concerns her and her boyfriend John’s road trip across America, where they discover a book about veganism and anarchism that gives them a purpose in life. While the narrator’s problems concern foo, with a few sections where online diet articles, celebrities and restaurants they find on the road are listed in almost pornographic detail, John’s problems are alcohol and violence. He gets into many fights throughout the book, and the inevitable breaking up creates a tension brought about by the question of if these two people will fix themselves. One cool connection I made between this and another book were its similarities to Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room. Both concern people on the edge of infinite despair, which brings into question the validity of the book’s events as well as the their strange sense of place. This book doesn’t break any new ground, but it is far from a bad book and a waste of your time.
Rating: 4/5
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