Review: L.I.E.

L.I.E. by David Hollander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s a chance Hollander could teach my son next year at Sarah Lawrence and, in any case, he’s been a mentor to my cousin David, but I’d have good things to say about this in any case.

The back-cover description gets right what’s happening in the story, but it falls short of explaining what’s really going on. This is a year-in-the-life of a group of suburban Long Island kids and their families as they deal with events in and around the end of high school. It’s also very funny, and then it veers into a remarkable examination of the nature of fiction.

The first substantial chapter of the novel turns into a multi-threaded narrative that comes together in a wonderfully humiliating moment funny enough to recall Thurber’s “The Night the Bed Fell.” After a series of separate misunderstandings and broken plans, Harlan Kessler is about to lose his virginity on the floor of his parents’ living room when everyone – parents, siblings, neighbors – arrives in flagrante delicto. Oh, and his dog dies too.

That aesthetic dominates the first half as Harlan experiences a Charlie-Brown-football relationship to his can’t-get-rid-of-it virginity. If the novel had simply continued in the same vein, I’d still have enjoyed it.

[SPOILER] It moves on, though, chronicling his successful relationship with Sarah, his growth as a guitar player, and his growing unhappiness with life on “Wrong Island.” As it does so, it becomes increasingly experimental in its narrative. We get, for one, a lengthy chapter written in the form of a play, featuring a sub-plot where Harlan saws his own skull open, releasing his brain, which goes on to saw itself open, releasing another brain, and so on. It can’t happen, and indeed it doesn’t, but it sets us up for the possibility that we’re leaving conventional narrative behind.

Then, in the final full chapter, we do indeed leave it. As Harlan rides in a car with a guitarist friend, he listens to a tape recording they’ve just made of their own jam session. As it turns out, though, they’ve inadvertently recorded Hollander himself as he’s written their secret thoughts. It’s excruciating for Harlan, but there’s no turning it off. His life isn’t real; it’s comprised of the words Hollander is giving us.

The effect is a dramatic broken fourth wall, and [SPOILER CONTINUED] Hollander emphasizes it by having Harlan simply drive off the page. He escapes his own narrator, Hollander himself, and we’re left with a striking final mini-chapter. In place of narration, we have a series of characters commenting on Harlan’s disappearance, talking as if they too have been freed from whatever plans Hollander had for them. The novel concludes, then, not with an ending but an unraveling, and the effect is profoundly liberating. Harlan belongs now to the world – or at least to us readers who are moved enough to continue thinking of him – rather than to the writer who created him.

I think all of that reflects some of the same things that Rick Moody tries to do – the novel is dedicated to Moody – but I like this more than the Moody I’ve read. (To be fair, the only full-length book of his I’ve read is The Five Fingers of Death.) Both men seem to balance a kind of punk aesthetic, a tendency to maul the structure of their work, with a real affection for their characters.

Here, it’s clear that Hollander cares about Harlan, that he wants this conceited, moderately talented and reasonably bright kid to find something like happiness. He won’t make it easy on him, but he will give him a shot at eventual fulfillment, a fulfillment he’d never satisfactorily find through any conventional narrative.

I apologize for giving more spoilers than I’d usually like, but I think it’s the unusual moves that take this from something funny and insightful into the realm of really provocative. If you love something, set it free. I guess that means Hollander loves his character, and it’s hard not to share a good bit of that for the character and the book as well.


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