Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Micah Wilkins is a liar; she tells us so herself. But she doesn't lie all that much to the reader -- or, rather, she lies and then backtracks to explain herself (only once in each case). We never catch her in a lie -- instead, she shares more and more as the book goes on, and we get a fuller picture of herself and her life.

If that makes her a liar, then every single human being is horribly untruthful and has been since the dawn of time.

Micah does have a secret, and it's a big one. At first, she covers over it -- lying around it, to hide the shape of the secret. She doesn't tell it to the reader until the middle of this novel, so I won't reveal it here. And she certainly has lied to her classmates, though she mostly seems -- as she explains it, of course -- to have allowed them to believe untrue things about her, and not corrected misunderstandings. She's a mildly unreliable narrator, I guess, but the reader doesn't have to keep an eye on every little thing she says and piece together the real story -- Micah is going to tell us everything before Liar is over, and we just have to keep reading to find out the true story.

So, for readers who really enjoy unreliable narrators, Micah is somewhat of a lightweight -- she tells us about lies rather than lying to us...unless she's telling some very big lies that she never admits to. (I can think of a few of them -- but I don't believe Larbalestier intended the reader to go down that path; she wants us to believe what Micah tells us, even as Micah tells us that she is a compulsive liar.) In fact, there are plenty of times when Micah keeps quiet, or doesn't answer questions, when lying could have served her better -- perhaps, instead of calling herself a compulsive liar, she could have seen herself as a young woman with secrets that had to be kept at all costs.

If you want a novel from the point of view of a teenage girl who is a world-class unreliable narrator, check out The Basic Eight, the magnificent first novel by Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket).It would make an interesting counterpoint with Liar; both novels have huge, central secrets that change the reader's conception of everything the narrator has said before that.

Liar has a complicated structure, mixing relatively straightforward narrative sections marked "Before" and "After" -- there's a major event in between, obviously -- with "History of Me" and "Family History" sections that fill in Micah's backstory. The whole novel is in Micah's voice, and she does, particularly early in the novel, tell the reader things that she later takes back, or explains further. Micah is a teenager at a progressive Manhattan high school, a loner, and almost completely cut off from the other kids in her school (partly because of her lies, and partly because of what her lies have masked).

I wrote "almost" completely cut off, because Liar's "Before" sections have Micah telling us about the one great exception -- her secret boyfriend, Zachary Rubin, whom no one else in the school knew she had a relationship with. Zach is missing as the novel opens, and that disappearance sets the action of Liar in motion. Before long, Micah becomes a suspect -- and, the more she reveals about herself, the more she insists that she had nothing to do with Zach's disappearance, the more the reader realizes that she had the capability, and maybe the motive, to get rid of him.

So, as Liar goes on, shifting backward and forward in time as Micah explains more and more of her secrets and past lies, the question becomes: how much do you trust Micah? Not trust that what she's saying is perfectly true, necessarily, but trust who she is? At the center of Liar is the question of identity, of who Micah Wilkins really is. In my reading of Liar, I came to believe that Larbalestier didn't really make Micah all that dishonest. I didn't see any serious lies that Larbalestier revealed Micah telling -- without having Micah explicitly take back those lies -- and I took that to mean that Micah was, in the end, believable. (Other readers may have different reactions.)

Liar is billed as a thriller, but most of the thrills don't come from chases and hair's-breadth escapes; it's a thriller of cat-and-mouse, with both the cat and the mouse provided by Micah, as her stories chase each other and her urge to explain herself eventually wins out. But her voice does make Liar a compulsively readable novel, and it has the pace and urgency of a thriller; this is not a book to read idly or savor -- it demands to be picked up and read straight through.

Sidebar: There was a controversy about the cover of Liar before it was published, as some may remember. The image at the top of this post is the cover the final book has; the cover just to the left was the original cover; it's the cover on the bound galley I read back in September. Micah -- a compulsive liar, let us not forget -- says that she's half-black and half-white, with short nappy hair. Clearly, the young woman on the first cover does not have nappy hair. Her photo is in black-and-white, and her face is mostly covered, but she looks pretty Caucasian, and that's what some people objected to.

The problem, though, is that the original cover is not just stronger as an image -- it's starker, in it's black-and-white simplicity, has much less of Micah's flesh visible, and explicitly hides her mouth -- but that it encodes a very important aspect of Micah's secrets and stories. So the question of which cover is more appropriate is really a question of identity. And I'd like to ask anyone who has read Liar to think about this: is the fact that Micah is half-black (though she doesn't identify explicitly as "Black" or "African-American") more important than that other identity? Really?

(Of course, that's an argument that depends on having read the book, and covers that only make sense after reading the book are not necessarily a good marketing choice. So I'm not complaining about the change, precisely, just musing about it. And I am amused to note that the new cover is in color, as if to signpost even more firmly to the reader, "See: she's black. BLACK! Get it? Now stop complaining!")