The Lie: A Novel [Paperback]

I want to tell you about this disturbing, erotic, haunting novel by a veteran writer you have never heard. But on the off-chance you will find The Lie too disturbing, erotic and haunting to read, I want to share a passage that gave me information I've found nowhere else:

"Success teaches nothing...all that's genuine and powerful that understands beyond all understanding comes from all the terrible failures that have scorched and honed and molded us into who we'll finally be... failure has nothing to do with rejection, or with humiliation, or with losing; it has only to do with not fighting back."

That's what they call "news you can use." It's also a link to the sadness at the heart of this book, which starts with 17 year-old Roberta Smollens sitting on a park bench in Philadelphia a week after the death of the father she hated and who, it seems, hated her. A man sits down next to her. He's Solomon Columbus. It's not long - I mean, it's the same day --- that Roberta takes Solomon to her attic bedroom and begins the affair that will, a month later, result in marriage. For Solomon, this marriage is pure joy --- he's scored a beautiful woman, and he can have her whenever he wants. And the thing is, he wants Roberta all the time.

That's okay with Roberta because that's what wives do. But she's hardly enraptured by the experience. She regards his lovemaking as "great chugging, puffing, huffing, locomotive... tearing down the tracks."

Her own pleasure? It does not happen. Inside, she's frozen --- she feels nothing. Which is how she comes to be obsessed with Rita Hayworth. As Fredrica Wagman notes in an explanatory essay:

"My fascination with Rita Hayworth began when I was very young because my mother was so enthralled with Rita Hayworth herself that she named me Rita, and although she polished my name off with the name Fredrica in the middle, it was the name Rita that profoundly connected me to my mother -- to my childhood and to that exquisite creature who ruled the sliver screen for all my growing years."

Wagman is a writer who notices every bruise and blemish, especially the psychic ones that never heal without love and therapy. So her Rita Hayworth is not the movie star with the glam life. For Wagman, Hayworth is a tragic victim:

"Rita's father took his young, beautiful and extremely talented daughter to Mexico, frequenting cheap night clubs and filthy dance halls where the liquor was flowing so they could eek out a bit of money on which to live by dancing for "tips". Things were so bad at times that Rita was forced by her father to catch fish off of wooden piers, often kneeling for hours in order to catch them with her bare hands and if that day she caught nothing, her father would beat her within an inch of her life, all the while introducing her as his wife and using her sexually."

You guess correctly if you sense that this short --- 214 pages --- novel takes the reader to places that nicer novelists never go. Wagman is good at this stuff, in part because she's scary smart about our inner lives, in part because she's has been there before. "Playing House" was about childhood incest. "His Secret Little Wife" is the story of an affair between the celebrated conductor of the Philadelphia Philharmonic and the 12-year-old girl who lives next door.

"The Lie" is equally shocking --- shocking, that is, if you are fortunate enough to have had a decent childhood. If you haven't, the "shocking" aspects of this novel may seem like non-fiction.

I have a feeling that Fredica Wagman is one of America's best novelists, that she is sadly neglected, and that when I get up the courage to read her other novels, I will feel this even more strongly.

I did not know what, exactly, I was expecting when I began reading this book but it was, surely not what I found. This book is 214 pages that recount the psychology of a girl/woman & her journey to self. Growing up with the mind set of the 50's, the books protagonist, Ramona, takes us through her life; a life in which she finds a myriad of heart break and bewilderment; loss & sorrow. From the abusive home in which Ramona grows up - the daughter of an abusive father and a narcissistic mother - to the sorrows of marriage to the most understanding of men - we view Ramona's struggle to survive her deepest pains & sorrows.

I found this book to be unique for sure. It was dark & a bit disturbing to me. This book can be read as a metaphor for some of the struggles that women, in general, face. I am not certain that this book would be for everyone but I will say that it provides you with a lot to think about. I believe that Ms. Wagman has real talent for getting to the pith of matters and that she relates her take on things in a most unusual, beautifully written, way.

From its very first pages, The Lie: A Novel is a uniquely bizarre tale that reveals the desolate feelings of Ramona Smollens through her stream-of-consciousness. Seen from the viewpoint of what is likely an emotionally disturbed mind, Ramona's pitiable rambling begins when she starts a long but energetic conversation with a man she meets on a park bench.

At first, she does not notice the thin, dark haired, swarthy young man sitting next to her. What possesses her is an obsession with his fingers: In her mind, they are thick, swollen fingers that seem to bulge at the end. They strike her as unnatural--out of place--like ten swollen penises. Because of these engorged fingers, Ramona desires this man, imagining him as some kind of sexual masterpiece.

__"I murmured that my name was Ramona Smollens but deep within me on the very most inside place I said it was Rhonda Smollens, whom I sometimes called Rita Smollens in honor of Rita Hayworth."__

At the beginning of The Lie: A Novel, the two chit-chat while they chain smoke cigarettes. In her nervousness, Ramona blathers on about her past hinting that she loathed her father because he regularly abused her. What's more, she despises her mother because she was aware of her husband's actions with Ramona, but did nothing to stop them.

Ramona and the phallic-fingered man continue their discourse even though heavy rain soaks them. Her "gloomy" new-found friend on the park bench beside her reveals that he, too, has a skeleton hidden in his personal closet. At the age of twelve, he remembers witnessing his father being gunned down by two bullets. The father died naked, face down on the floor.

A short time thereafter, the repressed Ramona and her thick-fingered thoroughbred marry. She quickly discovers that her husband's enormous sexual appetite does nothing to satisfy her own need for love, sexual or otherwise. To Ramona, their beastly sexual union occurs too often, too quick, and too coldly. Likening herself to sex symbol, Rita Hayworth, she feels obliged to fake overwhelming gratification which drives her husband's wild sexual ego to even more frequent copulation.

Ramona's feelings of loneliness, desolation, meaninglessness, and desperation grow accordingly. In her flow-of-consciousness, Smollens imagines what the sexual life of Rita Hayworth must have been like. Knowing that Hayworth had been married five times, Ramona imagines that she, like Hayworth, might just be an insatiable woman.
By now, Ramona has no desire for another man--any man. Instead, her sense of isolation, emptiness, and lack of love deepens.

When her husband discovers he has never brought his wife to a satisfying sexual climax, the two grow distant. Ramona imagines him as having secret lovers whom he does satisfy. She imagines she smells their perfume on his body. In one instance, she is convinced she actually sees his lover in their home.

Her husband denies her wild accusations but Ramona persists. He adds to her mental delusions by claiming she is becoming insane; she is hallucinating. His verbal barrage deepens her feelings of despair.

The Lie is a fascinating story to read, but it is quite disturbing. Author Wagman does her utmost to make her tale flow seamlessly along as several continuous thought streams in Ramona Smollens' troubled mind.

The tale is highly charged sexually. When Ramona's husband mounts her, she describes him as a "great chugging, puffing, huffing, locomotive ... tearing down the tracks."

I liked the fact that even Ramona's surname, "Smollens", had a sexual overtone, in my imagination at least. By changing one letter and dropping the final "s", it becomes Swollen, a word that describes over and over again on almost every page, her husband's swollen penis-like fingers, not to mention his own phallic, "private business" part as she calls it.

The surname also reminded me of Ramona's swollen, deeply injured self-concept which repeatedly attempts to deal with sexual reality in the imagined personhood of Rita Hayworth. As The Lie nears its end, the reader will finally see exactly what "the lie" refers to.

This book is not for the faint-hearted. I would recommend it as an intriguing read to anyone wanting to learn about the undisguised effects child abuse has on the human mind. The Lie takes the reader into the distraught, sometimes hallucinating, psyche of a woman who, to me is neurotically--maybe psychotically--disturbed rather than sexually inadequate.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have filled volumes warning of the shattering effects sexual abuse during childhood can have on the developing impressionable psyche. Without early interventive counseling, an abused child cannot mature. Fredrika Wagman's fascinating book, The Lie, makes just such a prediction come dramatically true.

Other interesting reads:
His Secret Little Wife: A Novel
I Love Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide
Rita Hayworth: A Photographic Retrospective
Men, Love & Sex: A Complete User's Guide for Women

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