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LIE STILL
by Julia Heaberlin
Bantam, July 2013
384 pages
$15.00
ISBN: 0345527046


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

A plot summary and list of characters fail to do justice to former journalist Julia Heaberlin's talent, but since readers expect those things, here they are (with certain details withheld): In the first few pages of LIE STILL, readers meet Emily Page, an above-average college girl at an average middle-American college in the midst of an average date rape. The rapist's refrain, you are a tease, the indifference of the campus police (there's no way you can prove this), and her feeling of guilt keep her secret under wraps. Although she carries her secret and it weighs her down, she finishes her education, works at a New York art gallery, has friends, marries a man who loves her, and is pregnant with their first child. She bears the normal exterior that we all show in public.

When her husband is hired to be the police chief in Clairmont, Texas (a dead ringer for Plano, a wealthy suburb north of Dallas), the local ladies throw a party and invite Emily as exotic amusement. We are witness to lots of big (extremely big) hair, egos, accents (TX & NY); small black dresses, really tight leggings, and some really big things that are not being said, Emily notices, just underneath the tacky comments and the botoxed brows. Emily meets Carolyn Warwick, who has left her husband and a dead child in Kentucky. Carolyn treats her house-keeper, Maria, with heartless, thoughtless racism. There's Misty, living in a home Carolyn owns, who is covered in razor scars; Jenny and Mary Ann, who are patients of the same plastic surgeon, an Ob-Gyn who has Nazi paraphernalia; Letty, who won a beauty pageant once and claims to be descended from Robert E. Lee, but isn't, and Tiffany, who has murdered her Chihuahua. As the novel continues, one of these women falls victim to a serial killer, and Emily, who has been getting hate mail related, she thinks, to her rapist, sees the type and tenor of the hate mail change for the worse.

The title of the novel is LIE STILL. A comma inserted between those two words would convey much that goes on in the book: After the characters are 19, 20, 21, they still must lie, they lie all their lives about who they are and what happened before. However, Heaberlin undresses the lies, one by one; the undressing occupies the rest of the novel. Bodycount. Betrayal, and Blood are givens of the genre, but profundity and hilarity are often not. It takes a mighty long laugh, and an awful lot of hairspray to hide the kinds of emotional scars the characters bear. Readers may be reminded, as I was, that the artfully turned hairstyle, the dainty ankle performing its balancing act in the right platform shoe, and the wicked comment are not just tacky Texas culture, but a kind of bravery that women routinely show in a state where masculine bravado is so important that women of middle years, and not virgins, are the ritual sacrifices.

At the beginning of the novel, a crow picks up a cheap, glittery plastic ring that once was on the finger of a little girl, now dead. At the end, the bird (is he an omen of death? Or the wise trickster god who came even before human memory?)drops the ring in front of another little girl, who bends to put it on. Symbol of marriage or ownership, take your pick, the ring, bought in gumball machine or jewelry store is a coveted symbol of having come of age. From plastic that seems to be gold to real gold with diamonds, the ring stands for a future told in fairy tales whose real worth is a cipher.

§ Cathy Downs teaches English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville; her Ph.D. is in American literature. On the side, she is a long-time fan of the well-turned whodunit.

Reviewed by Cathy Downs, August 2013

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