The Lie: A Novel [Paperback]

Fredrica Wagman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2009

Coming of age in 1940s and 1950s America, Ramona Smollens takes her cues about female sexuality from Hollywood movie stars. None is more voluptuous than Rita Hayworth, the redhead who knows how to please a man and becomes a volcano of passion at her lover's touch, whose image inspired American flyers on their missions in World War II and even graced the first atomic bomb tested at the Bikini atoll. Ramona marries young and escapes her mother's house shortly after the death of her father. She takes with her a dark family secret, the sort of secret one simply did not talk about and that would stalk her as she matured into her role as wife and mother, remained a devoted daughter to her aging mother, and secretly harbored an obsession with the iconic Hayworth.
The fictional story Wagman tells of one woman's struggle with the conventions of her day is a bold literary achievement. Underpinning it all is the sad, unspoken truth of the real-life, flesh-and-blood Hayworth, the woman whose father sexually abused her. "Men go to bed with Gilda," She used to say, "but wake up with me." During Hayworth's lifetime, the public had no understanding of the depth of mean, and pain, behind Hayworth's seemingly self-effacing words. To Ramona, and millions of women like her, Hayworth's on-screen persona seemed the ideal, but was in fact "the lie." With this novel, Wagman realizes Kafkas famous dictum that "a book must be the axe that breaks the frozen sea within us."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wagman's latest novel is a disappointing and angry look at the emotional devastation a young woman brings to her marriage. In breathless prose dominated by ellipses and em-dashes, Wagman portrays the halting narrative of Ramona Smollens, a lonely, repressed, Rita Hayworth–worshipping 17-year-old Philadelphia girl circa the 1950s who meets a young man in the park one week after the death of her father and marries him shortly after. Ramona's ongoing obsession with Rita Hayworth somewhat masks (and later exacerbates) the sadness in her life, the unsurprising details of which are slowly teased out. Drifting utterly unprepared into her new marriage, Ramona quickly recognizes that her husband leaves her unfulfilled, and her faking of sexual pleasure brings on incomprehensible feelings of desolation that are compounded by her assumption that Solomon is being unfaithful to her. The execution's a bit sloppy, and the experience fairly one-note. (Apr.)
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Review

"Fredrica Wagman writes like no one else: her prose swoops and dips and soars, taking us inside a strange and captivating fictional world. THE LIE is a wholly original look at the vagaries of love and desire as told through the vivid fantasies and acute perceptions of its narrator. An ordinary-seeming wife, mother and daughter, Ramona Smollens attempts to escape the grip of a painful past, in which she has had to endure a rageful father and a monstrously narcissistic mother, only to discover that the glamor of grownup life wears thin quickly enough and that marriage to a sympathetic man comes with its own disappointments and deceits. Identifying as she does with the mangled psyche and erotic allure of screen siren Rita Hayworth, Ramona speaks a kind of lyric truth that uncovers the heartbreak nestled inside the layers of daily life. Her inability to feel sexual pleasure gradually emerges as a metaphor for the bewildering gap that exists between our earliest wishes and the eventual shape of our destinies." — Daphne Merkin


"Wagman is a writer who notices every bruise and blemish, especially the psychic ones that never heal without love and therapy....I have a feeling that Fredrica Wagman is one of America’s best novelists." — The Head Butler.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Zoland Books; Original edition (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586421573
• ISBN-13: 978-1586421571
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,363,418 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My name is Fredrica Wagman, but it wasn't always. I started out as Riki Barris, "Riki" being short for Rita Fredrica, born in Philadelphia where I spent the first four years of my life in my grandparents home with my mother and father and my older brother. It was a great sprawling place where there were maids and my baby-nurse, big cars, a devoted chauffer by the name of I.J. Duckett, and the warmth of aunts and uncles and my grandparents all around us all the time whom I adored.

When I was four we moved into our own small house which was very hard on my mother who was used to all the space and all the help that everyone there could provide. My mother became quite depressed when we moved away from my grandparents and a hard time ensued after that for my brother and me. My father was a dentist, an oral surgeon who specialized in extracting teeth which was a kind of speciality in those days, although barbers were proported to have been doing it for years without all the training and all the honors my father collected at the University of Pennsylvania's dental school.

I attended schools first in the suburbs of Philadelphia and then in the city which was where we moved when I was eleven years old. I was married at a very early age, shamefully early, to Howard Wagman. Had five children, lost one, attended the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College after the children were born, and was writing fiction and poetry for as long as I can remember.

Fredrica Wagman is the author of six novels -- Playing House, His Secret Little Wife, Mrs. Hornstien, Peachy, and Magic Man, Magic Man --and The Lie, just released in April 2009

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing and haunting --- and brilliantly written, July 21, 2009

By 

Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lie: A Novel (Paperback)

I want to tell you about this disturbing, erotic, haunting novel by a veteran writer you have never heard. But on the off-chance you will find The Lie too disturbing, erotic and haunting to read, I want to share a passage that gave me information I've found nowhere else:

"Success teaches nothing...all that's genuine and powerful that understands beyond all understanding comes from all the terrible failures that have scorched and honed and molded us into who we'll finally be... failure has nothing to do with rejection, or with humiliation, or with losing; it has only to do with not fighting back."

That's what they call "news you can use." It's also a link to the sadness at the heart of this book, which starts with 17 year-old Roberta Smollens sitting on a park bench in Philadelphia a week after the death of the father she hated and who, it seems, hated her. A man sits down next to her. He's Solomon Columbus. It's not long - I mean, it's the same day --- that Roberta takes Solomon to her attic bedroom and begins the affair that will, a month later, result in marriage. For Solomon, this marriage is pure joy --- he's scored a beautiful woman, and he can have her whenever he wants. And the thing is, he wants Roberta all the time.

That's okay with Roberta because that's what wives do. But she's hardly enraptured by the experience. She regards his lovemaking as "great chugging, puffing, huffing, locomotive... tearing down the tracks."

Her own pleasure? It does not happen. Inside, she's frozen --- she feels nothing. Which is how she comes to be obsessed with Rita Hayworth. As Fredrica Wagman notes in an explanatory essay:

"My fascination with Rita Hayworth began when I was very young because my mother was so enthralled with Rita Hayworth herself that she named me Rita, and although she polished my name off with the name Fredrica in the middle, it was the name Rita that profoundly connected me to my mother -- to my childhood and to that exquisite creature who ruled the sliver screen for all my growing years."

Wagman is a writer who notices every bruise and blemish, especially the psychic ones that never heal without love and therapy. So her Rita Hayworth is not the movie star with the glam life. For Wagman, Hayworth is a tragic victim:

"Rita's father took his young, beautiful and extremely talented daughter to Mexico, frequenting cheap night clubs and filthy dance halls where the liquor was flowing so they could eek out a bit of money on which to live by dancing for "tips". Things were so bad at times that Rita was forced by her father to catch fish off of wooden piers, often kneeling for hours in order to catch them with her bare hands and if that day she caught nothing, her father would beat her within an inch of her life, all the while introducing her as his wife and using her sexually."

You guess correctly if you sense that this short --- 214 pages --- novel takes the reader to places that nicer novelists never go. Wagman is good at this stuff, in part because she's scary smart about our inner lives, in part because she's has been there before. "Playing House" was about childhood incest. "His Secret Little Wife" is the story of an affair between the celebrated conductor of the Philadelphia Philharmonic and the 12-year-old girl who lives next door.

"The Lie" is equally shocking --- shocking, that is, if you are fortunate enough to have had a decent childhood. If you haven't, the "shocking" aspects of this novel may seem like non-fiction.

I have a feeling that Fredica Wagman is one of America's best novelists, that she is sadly neglected, and that when I get up the courage to read her other novels, I will feel this even more strongly.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Psychologically On Point. Raw, Real & Very Different, November 14, 2009

By 

Marie "ZQuilts" (Friday Harbor, WA, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lie: A Novel (Paperback)

I did not know what, exactly, I was expecting when I began reading this book but it was, surely not what I found. This book is 214 pages that recount the psychology of a girl/woman & her journey to self. Growing up with the mind set of the 50's, the books protagonist, Ramona, takes us through her life; a life in which she finds a myriad of heart break and bewilderment; loss & sorrow. From the abusive home in which Ramona grows up - the daughter of an abusive father and a narcissistic mother - to the sorrows of marriage to the most understanding of men - we view Ramona's struggle to survive her deepest pains & sorrows.

I found this book to be unique for sure. It was dark & a bit disturbing to me. This book can be read as a metaphor for some of the struggles that women, in general, face. I am not certain that this book would be for everyone but I will say that it provides you with a lot to think about. I believe that Ms. Wagman has real talent for getting to the pith of matters and that she relates her take on things in a most unusual, beautifully written, way.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why Am I Sexually Inadequate?, November 10, 2009

By 

Regis Schilken "Rege" (Bethel Park, Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lie: A Novel (Paperback)

From its very first pages, The Lie: A Novel is a uniquely bizarre tale that reveals the desolate feelings of Ramona Smollens through her stream-of-consciousness. Seen from the viewpoint of what is likely an emotionally disturbed mind, Ramona's pitiable rambling begins when she starts a long but energetic conversation with a man she meets on a park bench.

At first, she does not notice the thin, dark haired, swarthy young man sitting next to her. What possesses her is an obsession with his fingers: In her mind, they are thick, swollen fingers that seem to bulge at the end. They strike her as unnatural--out of place--like ten swollen penises. Because of these engorged fingers, Ramona desires this man, imagining him as some kind of sexual masterpiece.

__"I murmured that my name was Ramona Smollens but deep within me on the very most inside place I said it was Rhonda Smollens, whom I sometimes called Rita Smollens in honor of Rita Hayworth."__

At the beginning of The Lie: A Novel, the two chit-chat while they chain smoke cigarettes. In her nervousness, Ramona blathers on about her past hinting that she loathed her father because he regularly abused her. What's more, she despises her mother because she was aware of her husband's actions with Ramona, but did nothing to stop them.

Ramona and the phallic-fingered man continue their discourse even though heavy rain soaks them. Her "gloomy" new-found friend on the park bench beside her reveals that he, too, has a skeleton hidden in his personal closet. At the age of twelve, he remembers witnessing his father being gunned down by two bullets. The father died naked, face down on the floor.

A short time thereafter, the repressed Ramona and her thick-fingered thoroughbred marry. She quickly discovers that her husband's enormous sexual appetite does nothing to satisfy her own need for love, sexual or otherwise. To Ramona, their beastly sexual union occurs too often, too quick, and too coldly. Likening herself to sex symbol, Rita Hayworth, she feels obliged to fake overwhelming gratification which drives her husband's wild sexual ego to even more frequent copulation.

Ramona's feelings of loneliness, desolation, meaninglessness, and desperation grow accordingly. In her flow-of-consciousness, Smollens imagines what the sexual life of Rita Hayworth must have been like. Knowing that Hayworth had been married five times, Ramona imagines that she, like Hayworth, might just be an insatiable woman.
By now, Ramona has no desire for another man--any man. Instead, her sense of isolation, emptiness, and lack of love deepens.

When her husband discovers he has never brought his wife to a satisfying sexual climax, the two grow distant. Ramona imagines him as having secret lovers whom he does satisfy. She imagines she smells their perfume on his body. In one instance, she is convinced she actually sees his lover in their home.

Her husband denies her wild accusations but Ramona persists. He adds to her mental delusions by claiming she is becoming insane; she is hallucinating. His verbal barrage deepens her feelings of despair.

The Lie is a fascinating story to read, but it is quite disturbing. Author Wagman does her utmost to make her tale flow seamlessly along as several continuous thought streams in Ramona Smollens' troubled mind.

The tale is highly charged sexually. When Ramona's husband mounts her, she describes him as a "great chugging, puffing, huffing, locomotive ... tearing down the tracks."

I liked the fact that even Ramona's surname, "Smollens", had a sexual overtone, in my imagination at least. By changing one letter and dropping the final "s", it becomes Swollen, a word that describes over and over again on almost every page, her husband's swollen penis-like fingers, not to mention his own phallic, "private business" part as she calls it.

The surname also reminded me of Ramona's swollen, deeply injured self-concept which repeatedly attempts to deal with sexual reality in the imagined personhood of Rita Hayworth. As The Lie nears its end, the reader will finally see exactly what "the lie" refers to.

This book is not for the faint-hearted. I would recommend it as an intriguing read to anyone wanting to learn about the undisguised effects child abuse has on the human mind. The Lie takes the reader into the distraught, sometimes hallucinating, psyche of a woman who, to me is neurotically--maybe psychotically--disturbed rather than sexually inadequate.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have filled volumes warning of the shattering effects sexual abuse during childhood can have on the developing impressionable psyche. Without early interventive counseling, an abused child cannot mature. Fredrika Wagman's fascinating book, The Lie, makes just such a prediction come dramatically true.

Other interesting reads:
His Secret Little Wife: A Novel
I Love Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide
Rita Hayworth: A Photographic Retrospective
Men, Love & Sex: A Complete User's Guide for Women