Lies and power

In The Little Liar by Mitch Albom, two young brothers enjoy a happy, comfortable life amid the vibrant Jewish culture in Salonika, Greece, just before the second world war. Both have a crush on a neighbor, Fannie. 

Sebastian, the older brother, is serious and pragmatic; Nico, younger, is charming and enjoys his reputation for not telling lies. Germans occupy the city, and a ruthless soldier uses the boy along with elaborate forms and procedures to convince Jewish families to cooperate with Nazi "resettlement," which entails boarding trains headed for Auschwitz concentration camp. 

Nico, separated from his family, learns that some lies are treacherous and others are essential for survival. Absolute truth is a luxury, impossible for people desperate to survive, controlled by those who have no compunction about lying. The teen embraces deception upon learning how he doomed his family.

Sebastian and his parents are transported to the camp while Fannie and Nico separately manage to avoid detection. The book follows the three children well into adulthood and their post-war lives - and another narrator, known as Truth, offers observations, historical context and insights about the various forms of lies:  “[T]his is a story of great truths and connections. You will find the big ones and the small ones interconnect.” 

People often avoid Truth, which early on made the narrator despondent until Parable advised donning a colorful robe. “Of all the lies you tell yourself, perhaps the most common is that, if you only do this or that, you will be accepted…. Humans do a great deal to be liked. They are needier than I can comprehend. I will tell you this much: it is often futile. The truth is … people ultimately see through efforts to impress them. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but they do.” 

After the war, one brother marries Fannie, and the marriage is unhappy, with the couple withholding real feelings and refusing to divulge their hopes and dreams. “It is nothing new; the lies spouses tell one another are most often omissions. You skip this detail. You don’t share that fantasy. You leave out certain stories altogether. You justify these acts by deeming me, the Truth, too agitating. Why stir things up?” The brother tells himself the deceit is motivated by kindness, but shame, guilt and distance soon follow. “Sometimes, it is the truths we don’t speak that echo the loudest.” Lies and the inevitable consequences become a prison.   

The other brother becomes wealthy, unhappy while insisting on living in a rundown apartment, lying about his profession and wallowing in depression. He refuses to seek help. “Help meant looking backward, and he wanted no part of that. Instead, he layered more and more sandbags between his past and present, building a dam high enough to stop even a massive flood of memories.” 

Truth is a tough taskmaster, at times suggesting that the partial glimpses of life through art, films or novels are another form of deception. And Truth and Parable conclude that people do anything – not so much for freedom but for forgiveness. The sentiment is repeated more than once. “A man, to be forgiven, will do anything.” 

Perhaps freedom is impossible without forgiveness, or forgiveness is a form of freedom along with truth. 

The narrator maintains that truth is not universal: “Were I truly universal, there would be no disagreement over right or wrong, who deserves what, or what happiness means. But there are certain truths that are experienced universally, and one of them is loss. The hollow in your heart as you stand by a grave. The lump in your throat as you stare at your destroyed home.” Some losses are permanent and irreconcilable.

Lies are associated with power and control and self-delusion about true motivations. “Humans are broken. Susceptible to sin. They were created with minds to explore, but they often choose to explore their own power. They lie. Those lies let them think they are God. Truth is the only thing that stops them. And yet. You cannot drown out noise with silence. Truth needs a voice…. A voice that could warn you how a lie told once is easy to expose, but a lie told a thousand times can look like the truth. And destroy the world.” 

This story is especially moving and suspenseful because true ramifications of lies told early in life unfold decades later for the three characters. Readers nervously turn the pages, wondering just when will the liar will be caught. 

 

Cost

Julia Lambert relishes what seems like a perfect life at the start of Cost, the novel by Roxana Robinson. A college professor, landscape painter and mother, she strives to observe and appreciate details in everyday routine: “The extraordinary loveliness of the world, how it was infinite and generous in its reach, how it could be soft and glistening, tangled and dense, velvety and bright.” That beautiful life spirals out of control and the novel's pointed insights and exquisite writing offer a model for any writer hoping to analyze family dynamics.

The book takes on the character of a holiday get-together, a family of grown adults who have not seen one another in a while and must overcome the distances that have developed. There are competing interests among two sets of spouses and two brothers with multiple and abrupt points of view, lending a sense of urgency as the family endures a roller coaster of emotions and questions revolving around guilt, shame, longing and lost trust. Robinson has a knack for suddenly, casually dropping eye-opening details from the past with a sentence or two.

Another son brings his brother's addiction to Julia's attention while she entertaining her parents at her cabin in Maine. Before hearing about Jack's addiction, her chief worry is the cognitive deficiencies of her neurosurgeon father and once-competent mother and how “they were starting to seem like strangers.” Both parents have a glimmer of awareness and Katherine, the mother, reflects on her losses:  “The small hard, bright facts, like nails that should connect it to the rest of her life, were missing. The place where her memory had been was gone, blurrily erased, like a window grayed by mist. … This was happening gradually, as though pieces of her mind were breaking off and floating away, like ice in a river.”  Still, Katherine is intent on keeping her condition to herself while mourning the loss of self, thinking about “how few new things she would do, how many things she would never do again…. Her world had narrowed.”

Despite her dementia, Kathrine senses the family's divides - between her daughter and ex-husband, between her two daughters and two grandsons. She mourns the loss of a close connection with Julia and wonders why her two daughters do not get along. She had once hoped that her daughters' disdain for each other were a phase and might end, but the attitudes were entrenched. “Hostility in the family seemed like such a waste. But she’d learned years ago that she could do nothing to fix this.” She appreciates time with Julia despite the inevitable flaws. “One thing you learned as a parent was humility.” 

Julia’s beautiful life falls apart that summer, exposing cracks. Initially in denial about the severity of Jack's problems, she insists that the entire family must confront her son at the Maine cabin, hoping that a family intervention might bring Jack to his senses. She also reaches out to Wendell, her ex-husband who has since remarried – both had affairs before their divorce – and a sister whom she rarely sees. She relies on the older brother, Steven, to deliver Jack to the cabin while shoving aside any interest or discussion about that son's work as an environmental activist and plans to apply to law school. Julia keeps talking about “we,” noting “Once we start, I guess we can’t stop it” and Steven realizes he has lost all agency for the endeavor: “he understood they had become partners.” He cares about his mother, gently confiding his concerns about Jack and divulging his own history with drugs, a problem quietly conquered without the support or knowledge of the family. 

Julia strives to be loving and supporting but sees her life was separate. “When your children were small, you tried to conceal your doubts and fears, your pettiness and failures. You tried to be what they needed – strong and certain, pure and loving. Of course they learned quite soon who you were – weak, uncertain, impatient, ungenerous. There was nothing of your character they did not know. Though there were parts of your life you kept to yourself…. There were secrets that should die with people.” 

Two family members, both the elderly mother and the addicted son, have a tenuous grasp on reality. Katherine, while pleasant, is confused and refuses to admit her challenges. “It felt precarious but exciting to carry on like this, to engage, ask questions. She felt as though she were flying, out in the wind, tied to something below by a thread. There was a continuous risk that she’d be found out, the air currents might suddenly tip her to the earth.”  She feels sly, moving through what is a slippery sense of time and space: “The thing was not to pause. It was like walking a tightrope: never think about falling, never stop moving.” 

She panics about losing memory. “Who were you if you had no past? If you existed nowhere but in this room, right now?” 

Katherine’s husband, Edward, as a retired neurologist recognizes that the outcome for those diagnosed with either heroin addiction or dementia is bleak. He grieves his wife’s decline as she repeatedly expresses newfound shock after being reminded about Jack’s addiction.  “He felt as though a blazing mirror had been held up to him. It was as though his entire life was being reassessed by someone else. He was powerless to control it, forced to observe it.” 

He also finds himself grieving that he never took the time to understood his wife, her needs and dreams. “The ideas was a kind of shock, that there might be another, alternate view of their life together. He’d always seen himself as the center of things, moving across the landscape of their life like a roiling storm center on a weather map.” Belatedly, he finds himself wondering if Katherine “might have been at the center of another system, possibly just as strong, just as roiling, but invisible on his map.” He concludes, “Getting older, it was impossible to see things the way you’d always seen them before.” Once renowned in his field, Edward feels rudderless, “Which is what age did to you, it stripped you of what you’d had, of your presence in the world.” 

The family is not close and all members distrust attempts for closeness. Growing up, Julia and her sister, Harriet, were discouraged from showing feelings, and the latter questions why society values close family ties. “What if your family happened to be made up of people with whom you had little in common, whose company you didn’t enjoy? Why wasn’t your family equally to blame, for not being close to you?” Both sisters tend to blame their father, Edward, and Julia assesses him. “He let nothing go by. He had to correct the world.” 

The intervention leads to a stint in rehab and eventual failure. Wendell's fury grows with futile attempts to convince Jack to listen and acknowledge the seriousness of his problem. “The way he acts, not looking at us, not talking to us, not admitting what he’s done, as though he’s too cool to deal – he acts contemptuous of us. … He devalues himself, the whole enterprise of having him and raising him – he acts as though it was all worthless. He doesn’t care about any of it…. He’s contemptuous of everything we’ve ever done as parents.” 

The struggle overwhelms the family and Julia slowly realizes that her life will never be simple or content again. “The unbearable pathos of objects. It was so strange that they all looked just as they had yesterday, though everything around them had been caught up in violent change. It was like a neutron bomb: a huge detonation, shattering all the humans but leaving the objects intact.”

Jack’s trouble rapidly spins out of control during the novel, at great cost for Julia. By the end, Julia wonders if she shares her father’s domineering presence. The sisters regularly accuse him of not being generous but in the end, he alone extends generosity that can only partially cover the economic costs that Jack's addiction delivers to Julia.  

Stripped of denial, Julia accepts the circumstances of Jack’s life and her own role with resignation.  “She believed in nothing so simplistic or logical as a natural moral system, no abstract code meeting out judgment. She didn’t think this was a punishment for adultery, nor for poor mothering, nor for her many sins, accruing over the years to a sum that required, by some terrible accounting, the unthinkable payment.”  Beauty no longer distracts her or gives her solace and instead, “Humility lay over everything like a gray mist.” 

She tries not to blame herself, but then, “of course her fault. She was his mother.”