LAYING DOWN THE LAW
Whether as a lawyer or a novelist, telling a good story is paramount
The Good Liar Catherine McKenzie Simon & Schuster
“A lot of lawyers are writers.”
You get the feeling Catherine McKenzie has dealt with this question before.
Born and raised in Montreal (among her classmates in elementary school was Heather O’Neill), one of three children of college professors, McKenzie had her interest in legal matters piqued in her teens by TV viewings of L.A. Law, and ended up with a law degree from McGill University in 1999. Specializing in litigation, she is leading the coalition working against Quebec’s Bill 62, which bars those who wear face coverings from giving or receiving government services. Oh, and she’s a novelist.
So, back to that lawyers-who-write question …
“To be a good lawyer, you have to be a good storyteller,” she said. “You’re not making up facts, but you are telling a story. To convince someone of something, you have to lay out the facts in a compelling way. The skills you develop writing effective pleadings and delivering them are very applicable to writing. Also, lawyers are driven, they’re focused, they know how to get things done. Why did I ever finish a book, for example, or ever think I could get it published?”
Writing novels and getting them published is something McKenzie has now done eight times over, amassing a dedicated international following with books most accurately categorized, in her own words, as “domestic suspense, sort of a cross between women’s fiction and thrillers. The suspense and the thrill and the mystery come from relationships as opposed to external forces.”
McKenzie, 44, cites Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train as examples, and her newest, The Good Liar, might just be the one to jump into that stratosphere. Not that McKenzie, accustomed to flying under the critical and awards radar in comparison to lower-selling writers deemed more literary, appears overly concerned about it.
The Good Liar opens with an archetypal 21st-century image: an office tower, this one in Chicago, has blown up; more than 500 people inside are killed. Every instinct in a reader’s mind will assume this is some sort of 9-11 scenario. It’s quickly shown to be something else, but by then we are already firmly in McKenzie’s wheelhouse, a place where subversion of expectation is a matter of course.
The focus rotates between three women whose lives and connections to the tragedy overlap. Each has reasons, whether via concealment or embellishment, to be less than entirely truthful about her role as a victim. Muddying the waters further is a documentary filmmaker who wants to tell their stories and becomes romantically involved with one of them.
The questions this book raises accumulate with every plot twist. What is the hierarchy of victimhood? Are you a bad person if you feel a touch of schadenfreude on hearing that someone you’ve known and disliked has died? Can we shield our children from the harsh realities of the world, and from our own flaws, without cheating them? What is the line, for a documentary filmmaker, between recording and exploiting? The Good Liar goes to those difficult places and many more. McKenzie has effected something of a Trojan Horse: The Good Liar is a novel of ideas in the convincing guise of a page-turner.
Not surprisingly for a novel about surviving a calamity that has claimed many, guilt looms large. One character even resorts to an invented website called I Know What You Did Last Summer, where people go to confess their secrets in anonymity.
“In the time of Cambridge Analytica, you have to ask: ‘How could you actually think that’s anonymous?’” said McKenzie. “But people have this need to confess, whether it’s in a religious or just a social sense. I’m not sure why it makes people feel better. It seems to me you’re just putting your ( guilt) on somebody else and making them deal with it.”
Secret-keeping, with all its complications, is something nearly everyone does in The Good Liar.
“A question I’ve always been interested in is: If you were to die today, what’s the one thing you would not want people to find among your stuff ? It doesn’t have to be some massive reveal, but we all have something. It’s normal. What I’m exploring in the book is how far these people are willing to go to keep their particular secrets.”
It’s hard to conceive of a secret more explosive than a mother’s abandonment of her children. (That’s not a spoiler, by the way. There are two characters who might conceivably do it.)
“What it comes down to for me is that people are never wholly good or wholly bad,” she said. “Life is a lot more complicated and messy than most people give it credit for, and the more of someone’s story you know, the less likely you are to dismiss them, to say: ‘You’re a monster.’ But, you know, you don’t have to like every character in my novels. I’m OK with that.”
The Good Liar was not the book’s intended title — that was the pithier Gone, until several other novels beat it to the punch. The forced change worked out for the best, though: Like the best titles do, this one deepens your reading. You’ll find yourself asking: “Which of these people is the good liar?” Until it dawns that it’s not just one of them — it’s all of them. And all of us.