USA TODAY International Edition
‘ Lie’ pierces the mystery of parenthood
Peter Ho Davies’ third novel, “A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself ” ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 240 pp., ★★★1/2), opens with a couple making the agonizing decision to abort a fetus that was likely to have serious medical issues if it came to term. “The list of things the baby might have was four pages long,” Davies writes. “Singlespaced.”
“Lie,” strictly speaking, isn’t about abortion. The bulk of this slim, gemlike novel is about the son that the parents ( all unnamed) do have, constructed from the brief scenes of joy, exasperation and fear that define parenthood. But the decision to terminate the pregnancy informs the entire novel as the parents process the feelings their choice with.
Early on, though, their son is enough to worry about. After struggling to breathe at birth, he has developmental issues, and Davies is an expert at showing how much attention parents apply to every movement and comment from an authority figure. “The boy’s preschool teacher has concerns,” he writes. Later: “The boy’s kindergarten teacher has concerns.” And then: “The first time they meet with his first grade teacher, she has concerns.”
“Concerns,” Davies understands, is a left them
grenade people lob into the lives of parents, exploding the fleeting moments they think they might be doing the right thing.
Mom and dad develop all sorts of ironic riffs to handle this, which both underscores their feelings and lightens the book’s mood. They bemoan their toddler’s “Cheerio squalor” and stock up on dad jokes. More directly, the father, a writer and teacher, sublimates his uncertainty by working as a volunteer at an abortion clinic, escorting patients past rows of pro- life protesters and absorbing their jibes.
Maybe the experience will provide writing fodder, he thinks, or allow him to make a karmic adjustment. But every emotion is tricky now: “He will understand that he’s not been at the clinic to do good, or even to gather material, so much as to find absolution.” Lacking that, his supervisor at the clinic encourages him to let it go: “Everyone has regrets. You know who has regrets? Parents is who.”
Davies’ overall position is resolutely pro- choice: The “lie” of the title, which comes from a quotation by the writer Anais Nin, is shame. But he also wants to show how the decision to have an abortion lingers, and how the weight a father carries, while different from the mother’s, is weight all the same. The novel’s latter pages fall a little flat as Davies strives to reconcile this handwringing with the dad’s growing child and declining father. Davies wants to avoid noisy, cliched reckonings, but “Lie” moves to its conclusion at almost too low a boil.
The heart of the novel, though, is a piercing depiction of a marriage under intense pressure – the fear for their child’s future, the struggle for intimacy, the “scorched whispers” the couple argues in. Resolution is important in novels, but it can be a cheat in novels about parenting. The anxiety might alleviate, Davies knows, but it never quite goes away.