Far From Brooklyn

I read this novel, “A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself,” by Peter Ho Davies, because it sounded like it might have some parallels to a novel of my own, “The One Who Stayed,” that I had recently completed, and as a result I thought I might approach the agent who represented it.

I had heard “A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself” was funny, about parenthood, and specifically about a parent raising a special needs kid. All of that could also be said about “The One Who Stayed.”

Another similarity: Both books have unmemorable and clunky titles.

But as it turns out the parallels are superficial. The hearts of the books are fundamentally different. “A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself” is the story of an unnamed narrator, his unnamed wife, and his once-named son (whose name I can’t remember now). In a sense, the son is not the couple’s first child. An earlier pregnancy was terminated because the fetus appeared not to be viable, although that was not entirely certain. So the ghost and the guilt of that first pregnancy hover over the second, and as it turns out the son that is born to this guilty and sorrowful couple is on the autism spectrum, as they say, although he is also “2e,” or “twice exceptional,” again as they say, referring to kids who are both extremely smart but also spectrum-y.

The book is, in essence, a retelling of the boy’s life, in brief (maybe 125 pages) form, and its impact on his parents. (Well, glancing at the acknowledgements, the author refers to something on “page 212” so I guess it was more than 200 pages in print form, although I really can’t see how that’s possible. The print-edition pages must have giant type and margins as thick as English muffins.)

In its telling, it feels like autofiction, and I definitely was reminded of the work of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez when I read it, but while the “Outline” trilogy and “The Friend” struck me as exciting and unexpected, “A Lie xxx,” while engaging, left me somehow unsatisfied. It felt true to life, no doubt, but in many ways that could be said to be a fault, because in its namelessness and its lack of narrative, it felt, more than anything, like any father’s diary of raising any son, albeit this son is 2e. The nameless parents share a certain wit but their badinage (sorry, that’s the word that comes to mind) is again, not really distinct, it sounds like any educated man and woman punning with each other in private. Toward the end, there is a page or two discussion of all the photos of the child, and again these sound like descriptions of any family’s photos. It’s weird–the book certainly felt true, and yet that is its flaw–it’s just not a distinct portrait.

I feel that I should be more generous in my reading of this book (and hell, in my reading of books in general) but I just can’t help but say that while, sure, this book was fine, it was annoying–annoying in its NPR sobriety, its accumulations of details that are highly specific and yet utterly commonplace, in its worried, self-conscious consideration of minor inconveniences. Also, annoying in its lack of invention. I’m not sure why I give some autofiction a pass (Cusk, Nunez, Knausgaard, and the granddaddy, Frank Conroy) but not this one… maybe it’s jealousy on my part that someone has written a book with passing similarity to my own and gotten it published, whereas I have failed (so far).

I read it all, which is not something that I do with many books. (I start far more than I finish.) So I wonder why I am so critical of it. It’s skilled, it’s an achievement, and yet here I am, carping.

Photo credit: Tiago Rodrigues on Unsplash