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  • Love Games
  • Kallie Wilbourn (bio)
Liars
Steven Gillis
Rare Bird Books
www.rarebirdbooks.com/liars-by-steve-gillis/
322 Pages; Print, $24.00

Eric McCanus is a successful novelist who has decided that he does not believe in love. His forays therein—especially a marriage that made him feel vulnerable and defensive—have baffled and wounded him, drawn from his emotional reactions a sort of mind-pickling element that has turned him sour and obsessive and determined to prove that love is a lie, and that people who claim to be in love are liars.

Divorced, living in a relationship that purports to be casual and open, having the occasional affair to prove his disbelief in the value of fidelity, he observes an openly loving couple (Cara and Matt) in his local supermarket. They offend him. What liars they must be! He decides to insert himself in their lives and prove to himself and to them, and to anyone who will listen, that they are lying. To do this he embarks on an elaborate scheme that commences with stalking them to learn about their lives and how to draw them into his web. (This is the sort of activity McCanus loves; he is in the know, they are not). Once he catches and confuses them, he plans to seduce the woman and thus confront the couple with the truth about their love (and all love) being a big fat lie. He also begins another novel about this unmasking of phony love—one in which he plots how, exactly, to ensnare and manipulate them and how they are likely to react. Blocked in his writing since completing a second, weaker novel than his first, he is delighted to find himself inspired to write a third that will prove to the world his thesis: true love is a myth.

Resourceful and wily in his pursuit, McCanus draws the couple in and proceeds with his manipulative plan. This develops as he learns more about them, writing his scheming scenarios all the while. And though he is prescient when it comes to some aspects of the plan, he also comes in for some disquieting awakenings about himself and others, and what motivates him to behave as he does. These are not awakenings that he comes to on his own, but through the women he most cares about. They are the ones who make obvious that much of his compulsion to scoff at love emanates from needs within himself that he quashes and denies.

Reading this novel reminded me of Choderlos de Laclos' Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), in which a world-weary seventeenth Century couple make a wager about whether the man can seduce an innocent, virtuous, pious woman whose husband is away, fighting in one of Louis XIV's endless wars. One difference in Liars is that McCanus's live-in partner, Gloria, is at first amused, then progressively more skeptical toward his stalking seduction of the supermarket couple. Soon her observations and comments about his motives and behavior (and those of his ex-wife, Lydia) come too close to home to salve the irritation and doubt seeing the couple has inspired in him. One could also compare Ellis's treatment of McCanus with John Fowles's frequent treatment of male characters who assume they are the ones in control of their relations with women, only to find that however much they manipulate and assume superior intelligence (unconsciously or not), in the end they are hoisted on their own petard. McCanus's "love" interests—Gloria, Lydia and Cara—are all very strong characters, and very distinct from one another. They are attractive but not defined by or entirely valued for their appearance—by McCanus or their own sense of self-worth. All are skilled and creative in some way, and diligent workers. And Cara's husband, Matt, though he is a gentle, tolerant poet type who should per McManus's assumption be easily duped, stands firmly on his beliefs even as he is drawn into McCanus's web.

Liars, like its protagonist, draws one into the company of a manipulative, somewhat callous person for two hundred pages. This would become tiresome if not for...

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