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Liars and
Saints by Maile Meloy Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended) |
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Family Ties and Lies It’s a rare debut novel that earns our
four-star rating, and Maile Meloy’s first novel, Liars and
Saints, earned it handily. Using the spare writing style practiced in her
short stories, Meloy tackles the novel by telling the complicated story of
four generations of an American family from the 1940s to the present. All the
characters are both liars and saints, as are we all. Meloy uses the opportunity
of unusal events to showcase ordinary human nature, and unfolds us for who we
are with poise and grace. While the characters in Franzen’s award-winning
novel of the Midwestern family, The Corrections, were unlikeable,
Meloy’s characters are not only likeable, but even when we see them tied up
in their lies and misbehavior, we like them, and want to spend more time with
them. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 4, pp. 32-7: Margot
was a quick study, and she liked rules and appreciated their function—there
wasn't anything more to it than that. She wasn't Saint Margot, as her sister
called her, and she wasn't a prig. She liked the rules of church: don't let
the sun go down on your anger, do unto others, turn the other cheek. She
loved the systems at school: the sonnet form, geometry, and fox-trot. By
eighth grade she understood that there was a way to dress and to comport
yourself, which affected how others treated you, and she understood how
easily she had avoided Clarissa's difficulty with grown-ups and nuns. Her
sister knew it, too; it was why Clarissa hated her. It was in Margot's nature
to please. In
high school, when Miss Blair and Mr. Tucker came to Sacred Heart to teach
dancing lessons, and Miss Blair went round the circle of girls giving makeup
tips, she stopped when she got to Margot and shook her head. "I've never
seen a girl so perfectly groomed," she said. Margot
smiled at Miss Blair, embarrassed. She slept in curlers to make her hair bob at
her shoulders, but her lashes were dark and thick without anything on them,
and her eyebrows arched on their own. "I
have nothing to offer," Miss Blair said. "I'm slumped." Mr.
Tucker, who danced like a prince, did not seem to be slumped by Margot at
all. When Miss Blair was busy correcting the girls on the other side of the
gym, he would cut in, stranding whichever girl Margot was dancing with, and
fox-trot Margot all over the floor. Other girls whispered it: she was the
perfect partner he deserved. Miss Blair was too tall for him, and too severe.
Margot was the right size; the top of her head came right to Mr. Tucker's
nose. When they danced, the girls forgot their feet and watched—they only
pretended to keep dancing, so Miss Blair wouldn't notice and stop the whole
thing. Once,
when the music ended and Miss Blair was still on the other side of the gym,
Mr. Tucker smiled at Margot in their finishing pose. "What a sweet,
sweet face," he said. Margot
was happy, and could have gone on dancing in the gym once a week till the end
of time. The other girls daydreamed about Mr. Tucker, but he had chosen her,
and she didn't need to daydream. Miss
Blair and Mr. Tucker emceed the dances at Sacred Heart, when the girls
decorated the gym and the boys came from Immaculata. Miss Blair called the
dances, and Mr. Tucker gave prizes and made announcements. Mr. Tucker in a
tuxedo was a glorious thing, especially compared with the skinny schoolboys.
Margot's date for the spring dance at the end of her sophomore year was a boy
named Hal Fitzhugh, who played basketball. He was a terrible dancer, his long
arms and legs getting in his way. Margot tried to hide her disappointment,
and Hal went off with some other Immaculata boys, saying he'd be back. After
a long time alone at a table in her blue chiffon dress, watching the other
girls dance with their perfectly competent dates, she went looking for Hal.
The air outside was fresh and cool in the dark, after the stuffy gym. She
found Hal behind the building, passing a flask to another boy. He smelled
like her mother's gin. "You
know that's not allowed," Margot said. "A
guy’s gotta have some fun." "Dancing
is fun," Margot said—though it hadn't been with him. "Not
with you, sweetheart," he said. "You're out there keeping score on
what I do wrong." The
other boys laughed, and Margot looked around at them, flustered. She had
never been brayed at like this before. "You're
like a coach we had," Hal went on. "Grumpy old bastard." The
boys laughed again. "How
dare you!" she said. Hal
grinned at her. "Drink?" He offered the flask. Margot
spun and left them there—not marching off, exactly, as it was hard to march
in high heels on soft grass—unable to speak. She was just deciding whether to
cry or not, when she rounded the comer of the building and bumped into Mr.
Tucker. "Mr.
Tucker!" she said, and they both apologized; he held her elbow to steady
her. What
happened then was a confused rush of images, as Margot reconstructed it later,
but she remembered being kissed by Mr. Tucker, and her knees nearly giving
way beneath her. She remembered following him to his white convertible, and
riding in it. and looking over the ocean but not knowing exactly where. She
remembered his hands unzipping the blue chiffon dress her mother had made,
and the softness of everything he did, and her feeling that all rules in the world had been
suspended for this to happen, and how sweet that suspension was. Mr.
Tucker disappeared after that, as he always did when school was out, and
Margot did her chores and thought about other things—but by August she
couldn't ignore what had happened to her body. She knew what a girl had to do
in this situation, and she told her mother. Yvette cried. Then she held
Margot and told her it would be all right. She said there were some things
you didn't have to tell people; it would only upset them to know, and
wouldn't do them a bit of good. Margot thought she should go to confession,
at least, and tell her father. "No,"
her mother said. "You can leave the priests and your father out of it,
and tell God on your own." Then
Yvette packed Margot's suitcase and sent her off to France. The
Planchets were distant cousins of her mother's: no one was sure of the exact
connection. They lived in a drafty stone farmhouse in Lisieux in Normandy.
Everyone at home thought Margot was just having her junior year abroad,
working on her French. It made perfect sense. The Planchets knew the truth,
but it didn't seem to bother them at all. They took her in and assigned her
chores. She went to the local lyc~e withJean-Pierre Planchet, who was
fourteen and still a boy, obsessed with his exams. Jean-Pierre
was scornful of Margot's French, and mocked her for it. "She speaks like
a baby," he told his parents, and she guessed it was true. He spoke
English to her, showing off, whenever the elder Planchets were out of the
room. No one at school seemed to notice her condition; everyone knew American
girls were un peu grosse, and she wore the loose jumpers her mother
had sewn in a rush before she left. M. Planchet loved America, and after a few
glasses of wine he would lose his shyness and speak in English. He loved
Margot's father, whom he had never met, for flying a fighter plane in the
war. He loved to talk about the Chermans. "Germans,"
Jean-Pierre would correct him. ' "Oui, ca. Les Boches. They were building these
tanks from 1936. And you Americans started from the neutral, and made so many
tanks—it is like a miracle." "He
thinks it's still the Occupation," Mme. Planchet would say in French.
"Pay no attention." "The
Germans would come tomorrow if not for the Americans," M. Planchet
insisted, in English. "But the atomic bomb: for this we can be
thankful." "Enough,"
his wife said. M.
Planchet shrugged. "Or you fight, or you lose," he said.
"That's the war." "Eityer
you fight or you lose," his son corrected him. "Oui!"
he said. "C'est la guerre. " Margot
was never sick, and always hungry. She watched M. Planchet arrange the cold
meat tray before the evening meal with his delicate hands. When he said,
"Open your mouth and say thank you!" she did. What he popped onto
her tongue was sometimes salty, sometimes smooth and rich, sometimes sweet. "From
Spanish pigs, who eat nothing but figs!" M. Planchet would say; or
simply, "This is good for you, this!" In
the Planchets' kitchen was an earthenware jug filled with a dark red tissue
that looked like raw liver, half submerged in red liquid, called la mire.
After lunch and dinner, taking the dishes in to wash, Mme. Planchet poured
the red wine from the bottom of each glass into the jug, feeding the mother.
It was a kind of mushroom, she said, and it cured the wine, and from the
spigot in the bottom of the jug came fresh red vinegar. Margot dutifully
added the leftover wine, and the sharp vinegar smell pricked her nose, but
after the first time she didn't look in at the shiny, organlike growth. It
was such a grotesquerie. With that embarrassing name, and she had nothing in
common with it and never would. On
Sundays the family went to Mass in the new Basilique dedicated to Therese
Martin, and the statue of the young saint stared down at them. Mme. Planchet
said that Therese had entered the convent at fifteen because she knew the
temptations faced by young girls. M.
Planchet said, "Bah! To marry the Spouse of Virgins—what a life. You are
better off, cherie" After
Mass, Margot helped prepare the Sunday meal, and poured the wine. She began
to dream in French, and to think it strange that she had ever imagined her
life without this detour from normal events. There was no question that it
was only a detour—a long, eventful French dream—and that her life would
resume its orderly course when it was done. Readers of Liars and
Saints have known the Santerres or have been them. That recognition opens
readers to thinking about human nature in new ways, thanks to Meloy’s fine
writing. If this book doesn’t win awards, it should. Steve Hopkins, June 21, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Liars
and Saints.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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