Books |
The Lie
Fredrica Wagman
By
Published: Jul 21, 2009
Category:
Fiction
I want to tell you about this disturbing, erotic, haunting novel by a veteran writer you have never heard of. 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. And he’s not like other men in a very specific way:
…. his fat peasant hands that were almost like primitive art — each shocking finger round and wide at the base, but instead of getting slightly narrower as it progressed like most fingers do, it kept all its fat round wideness all the way up to the nail where there was a certain unusual thickening…a rather bulbous thickening you might say all around the nail head itself, so that each finger looked exactly like a penis…and there were ten of them…ten perfect penis fingers…I couldn’t take my eyes away.
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: An Unexpected Tale of Forbidden Sex 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 Fredrica 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.
To buy “The Lie” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “His Secret Little Wife: An Unexpected Tale of Forbidden Sex” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Playing House” from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit Fredrica Wagman’s web site, click here.
