Thursday, December 27, 2018

"What Some Would Call Lies"



Rob Davidson (robdavidsonauthor.net) teaches American literature and creative writing at Chico State University. His latest book comprises two novellas that brilliantly explore the tricks of memory in coming to terms with the past. 

"What Some Would Call Lies" ($16.99 in paperback from Five Oaks/Formal Feeling; also for Amazon Kindle) begins with the tale of one Monica Evans, entitled "Shoplifting, or How Dialectical Materialism Can Change Your Life."

Monica, 27, her husband Jeff, and their toddler son Jacob move to Chico, "a little hamlet of progressive thought surrounded by a wasteland of backwater conservatism," as she tells her mother, Claudia, her bĂȘte noir. Claudia encourages her to write, but not about Saundra, Monica's late sister. Yet Monica, who raises Jacob pretty much alone because of Jeff's long work hours, is obsessed with her.

Saundra died from a fatal combination of booze and sleeping pills. "That's what torments me," she tells her therapist. "Whatever was going on in my sister's head. Nobody really knows." Was it an accident? Suicide? Monica has to know, so she attempts to duplicate Saundra's feelings, like the time she was caught shoplifting (when Monica did the same, "it felt wrong andexciting, perverted andglorious"). She writes Saundra's autobiography, calling on memories that never existed, ghosts wearing Saundra's favorite yellow dress.

In the second novella, an older Jackie Rose looks back on his childhood in Duluth, Minnesota (Davidson's own birthplace). On the verge of becoming a teenager, he is naive about his world of 1980 until his substitute sixth grade teacher, Ms. Poindexter, introduces the class to the underbelly of American history, definitely not standard textbook issue. "There is always a history other than the history you receive," she says, "other ways of telling the story."

Jackie's parents fight more and more; his mom wants to go to college, his dad (who sells kitchenware) drinks too much and, as his son discovers, is stepping out and lying about it. Jackie meets an older girl whose affections stoke his nascent sexuality. And then she disappears, leaving only the wisps of memory. 

If these memories are lies, these stories poignantly suggest, perhaps they are some of the truest things about us.

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