But before long, the novelty of Alice’s presence begins to wear thin, and she resorts to desperate measures to keep Mizuko from slipping out of her grasp. Alice is surprisingly successful, for a while-almost immediately, she and Mizuko are having sleepovers together, taking performance-enhancing drugs together, even traveling for a long weekend to Texas together. To Alice, however, there’s no such thing as mere coincidence the confluence of variables underpinning her introduction to Mizuko is “evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates.” Ditto their superficial similarities-withholding mothers, absent fathers, loser boyfriends-which she reads as “clear proof of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner.” The intensity of these lines is representative of the singlemindedness with which she pursues closeness to Mizuko, a mission greased by Rupert’s summary dumping of Mizuko and the fact that Alice has already “dissected the pictorial equivalent of her DNA” knowing all of Mizuko’s tastes in advance, she can pass them off as her own. The most crucial element of Alice’s plan is the coincidence that Mizuko’s current romantic partner, Rupert, is an acquaintance of Alice’s, and she uses him as an excuse to say hello. Alice describes the discovery of Mizuko’s account as the moment “the solid world” around her started “to slide away, like wet sand sinking beneath the water.” The all-consuming infatuation only has to remain virtual for two weeks: Mizuko’s habit of geotagging her locations in real time soon enables Alice to facilitate a meet-cute at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Now she’s back in Manhattan for the first time since toddlerhood, and a family friend’s interest in genealogy unwittingly brings her into the orbit of Mizuko Himura, an instructor at NYU and writer of autofiction who also maintains a robust and aspirational Instagram feed.
Sudjic’s novel follows 23-year-old Alice’s ill-fated sojourn to New York, where she travels to reunite with her estranged paternal grandmother, Sylvia though born in the city, Alice was raised mostly in England following the disappearance and presumptive suicide of her adoptive father, Mark.
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