Liar / Justine Larbalestier

When I was a teenager, I lied quite a bit. Mostly about homework and covering for things my parents didn’t want me to do. But also I would do it to make myself look better. Did you know I drove a Ferrari once? (No, not really.) My insides are pretty boring. I still lie sometimes. When you lie you have to remember what you told and who you told it to (and who they might have told). It’s an exhausting experience mentally.

I volunteer as a mentor at a local public high school. The kids I work with lie a lot. Mostly about the same things I lied about as a teenager: schoolwork and covering for things their guardians don’t want them to do. Not so much directly to me, as I’m not an authority figure. But sometimes admitting the truth to anyone makes you feel vulnerable. Very few people want to be vulnerable. For the listener, the experience is trying as well. I stop listening sometimes, because I don’t know what ground is solid enough to stand on anymore.

Justine Larbalestier’s Liar opens with the protagonist Micah Wilkins, a young black girl on scholarship at a private school in New York City, telling the reader that she’s a liar. Then Micah tells the reader about some of the lies she’s told her classmates, such as that she’s a boy. Since she has short hair, is relatively flat-chested, and plays decent basketball, they believe her. That is, until one of the girls hears her laugh and realizes a boy doesn’t laugh that way. Then Micah replaces that lie with another, that she was born hermaphroditic and that’s why she was ashamed to let everyone know she’s a boyish girl.

The book is divided into three running threads of commentary. Before is the thread for Micah’s secret relationship with her boyfriend Zach. Secret from friends at school, because Zach has another girlfriend. Secret from her parents, because Micah’s parents have forbidden her from dating. The After thread concerns what happens to Micah after Zach disappears and the police find his body. Suspicion falls on Micah because of her secret relationship and her well-known proclivity to lie. And the third thread contains bits and pieces of Micah’s history and that of her odd family.

Shortly into the book I realized that Micah could be lying to me, the reader. She sorta warns that this might be the case on the first page, but confirms it solidly later on. After this idea settles in, I didn’t know what to make of any of the things that Micah said. Nothing. And that’s a problem.

In an appearance at the University Book Store on Monday, Justine Larbalestier talked a bit about this. There’s a contract between fiction and a reader. The book is a lie. It’s stuff the author made up. The contract is that the reader pretends the book is the truth. The inability to do that in some cases ruins books. A person might not read fantasy because they can’t pretend wizards flinging bolts of magic is real.

The problem with an unreliable narrator is that it breaks that contract. I can’t pretend what I was just told is the truth. In most stories I’ve read with an unreliable narrator (very few actually), the lies are limited and sometimes there’s a *wink-wink* effect that lets you in on the truth according to the book. Liar doesn’t have those characteristics.

Pretty much everything in the book could be a lie. Micah is the narrator 100% of the way. The perspective never shifts out of the first person. Micah changes her story so often that even the constant things seem inconstant. Micah is the girl who cried wolf one too many times. That interferes with my relationship with the book.

The upshot of all that is that I don’t know if I actually liked the experience of reading the book. Not yet at least. It’s an excellent book. I haven’t read anything else that took the a narrator’s reliability to such depths before, and I can’t imagine many doing it so well. Nevertheless, the experience is very unsettling and I haven’t yet decided if I will recommend it generally.

Aside from the unreliable narrator, there’s much to recommend about the book.

Micah Wilkins is an awesome character. It’s not easy to create an outcast character that isn’t a victim. I got a good psychological sense of why she lied. She’s smart but very messed up. Her rebellion makes sense. She understands her parents’ restrictions but chafes at them too.

The secondary characters aren’t quite as well fleshed out, but they all are realistic and interesting. Micah’s parents and family embody an ex-hippie gone native approach to parenting. Her grandparents live on a farm in upstate New York that’s off the grid. Micah’s dad rejects that approach to live in the city. He still lives a mostly unencumbered life as an underpaid travel writer. Both her parents are loose in how they treat Micah but over-protective and stifling in other respects. The teachers, counselors, and students at school don’t have a lot of depth to them but they aren’t caricatures either.

I think Liar captures the high school experience pretty well too. It never goes into a caricature. The strong kids pick on the weak, but it never seems arbitrary like a sit-com.

And one comment about the cover, a previous version of which got a lot of negative publicity. Some of the kids I mentor really do spend a lot of time covering their faces with their jackets like on this cover. Hiding from any kind of attention like Micah frequently does. It’s heartbreaking. While it doesn’t really say much about the plot of the book, I think it really does capture Micah’s demeanor, or what I imagine her demeanor to be.

Now that that’s out of the way, there’s some things I want to discuss about the book that involve spoiling it. So I will go on to page 2 for that. Don’t read that until you’ve read the book or decided you won’t ever read it. Ms. Larbalestier has written that the ending can be taken a couple of different ways. Reading how I interpreted the ending can bias you toward a particular interpretation. Normally I don’t really worry about spoiling a book when the result is the lack of surprise. A book should be stronger than that. But in this case I’d rather not influence your interpretation of the ending. So read on only when you’ve come up with your own opinion.

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Some other blogged reviews:

• Writer Musings (spoilers)
• Babbling About Books, and More
• Presenting Lenore
• Fyrefly’s Book Blog
• Hey! Teenager of the Year
• The Book Smugglers

Title: Liar
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Cover creator: Danielle Delaney (designer) / Ali Smith (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Bloomsbury
Format: Hardcover
Length: 371 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-59990-305-7
Subject: Honesty — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.L32073 Li 2009

The comments below may contain spoilers. Don’t read them if you ever care to read the book and haven’t yet done so.

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