Elena Ferrante's work argues that people lie for a deceptively simple reason: It’s an act of creation, not unlike writing, the critic Merve Emre says. (One of the twists Karen reveals: Those aren’t actually their names.) As Karen considers Sarah’s actions, the reader begins to wonder what Choi herself is doing, and why. Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise undercuts its own plot halfway through the book by letting a new lead character, Karen, detail all the invention and sanitization that the last narrator, Sarah, is guilty of, Sophie Gilbert writes. In fiction, the motives behind characters’ lies can be less clear-cut and more unsettling, especially when they pull tricks on unsuspecting audiences. “Many more of us should question who has rights to a place, and whose rights were stolen in the process,” Zhang says. C Pam Zhang’s novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, along with a spate of other revisionist Westerns, attacks those false pretexts. So are the fictions that the American West was an empty place, apart from white settlers, where any man could make his own destiny. Those deceptions are foundational in American history. The cherry-tree myth was wholly invented by a biographer, and Washington used trickery, forgery, and spying to his advantage in the Revolutionary War, Amy Zegart explains. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Gottschall, Kelly says that we tweak our memories and anecdotes to pull meaning out of chaos.Įven George Washington could, in fact, tell a lie. ![]() After all, lying is ubiquitous: “We all have a tendency to fictionalize, whether we realize it or not,” Maura Kelly writes. That’s true regardless of whether a character or a narrator means to be malicious. Spinning falsehoods is its own kind of storytelling, and when it happens within a book’s plot, it can be fascinating, destabilizing, or both. No one can make a story sing quite like a liar.
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