Customer Reviews

The Lie: A Novel

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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.

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.

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

In this story the main character Romona has been living a very sheltered and sad life when she runs into Mr. Columbus who will soon be her husband. Throughout the book Romona is busy keeping parts of her life a secret. Those secrets range for parts of her abusive homelife growing up, to her intimate relationship with her husband, to in general lying about every part of her life. She is so caught up in this life of lies that she has a hard time telling the truth and lives a very sad life. There is a great twist at the end that I won't reveal here (don't want to spoil it).

At first the book took a bit of getting used to. The Author uses a very descriptive writing style that I find makes it hard to get engrossed in the book (others swear that this helps with get engrossed into a book). Very early on you feel attached to the main character Romona and are in you heart hoping that she begins to realize that the life of lies she has created is killing any chance at her happiness. When the twist at the end does come you it takes your breath away. To me this book had that great quality of getting you to care about a character and still keeping you guessing until the very end. Although this book might not be for everyone, I feel that is it was a great short, but intense read.

What a novel! This book was interesting, unique and engaging. The Lie gave me so much to think about. The first thing I noticed about the book was the cover. It was eye catching and pretty. I would have bought this book in the bookstore with a cover like this.

First of all, the writing is beautiful. It is written in a stream of consciousness type of form. It reads almost like a lyric. This form of narrative gives you an excellent insight into the inner workings of Ramona's mind. I also thought that it was beautifully written. Books that are written in this style are normally difficult for me to relate to and like but I found that it was not the case with this one. I don't think I would have liked this book as much if it had been written in any other way.

I loved Ramona. She was a great narrator. I loved being in her head for the two days I was reading this novel. She was completely honest in her thoughts. I truly liked her.

This issues that this book deals with are so interesting and so reflective of the struggle women have to go through. Ramona is literally in a battle with her own pre-conceived notions of sexuality. She sees Rita Hayworth as an ideal and constantly sees herself as falling short. It becomes so embedded in her psyche that she begins to believe her husband is having an affair with the superstar. I think all women go through this in some form or another.

I think all women should pick this book up. It really is an interesting book and makes you think.

Romona Smollens has lived her whole life completely ignored. The day she meets Mr. Soloman Columbus is the first day she feels as though she is someone. He sits down beside her on a bench across from Belgravia Hotel. If not for his ten penis-like fingers, and the sadness that seems to emanate off of him, Romana isn't sure if she would have even noticed him. He is nothing special, except that he listens to her every word, and makes her feel as though she is the center of his world.

Shortly after their meeting Ramona finds herself marrying Mr. Solomon Columbus, but why?, is it because she truly loves him or because he is infatuated with her as no one else has ever been. Ramona isn't sure, she's not even sure she knows what love is and what it should feel like. She just knows that he loves her, and she must do everything to keep him by her side, even if it means to Lie.

Every night Mr. Colombus rolls atop Ramona, and goes about 'making-love' to her. She's unsure what this could possibly mean, especially because she can't feel a thing down there, she's completely frozen. That doesn't mean he has to know about it though, and so she pretends she's having the time of her life, as though she were her beloved Rita Hayworth, the goddess of the flamenco and sex.

Her lies build up inside her, creating a sort of wall against the real world. She can't seem to tell the truth regardless of how hard she tries, and it makes it worse when she realizes that her husband may have someone else on the side. How could he do such a thing to her? How can he come home every night to her smelling of that woman, of her rich gardenia perfume! It becomes an obsession for Ramona, to find her husband's mistress, and make him stop the lies.

I wasn't sure if I would be interested in reading this book when the publisher contacted me to review it. I was skeptical, by solely looking at the cover! I know, it's horrible to read a book by it's cover alone, but I tend to do that more often than I should. Before I could tell myself no, I decided I needed to read a little about the book, and decide from it's description whether it would be something I would enjoy. The description alone caught my attention, and I decided I should give it a go.

I took this book with me to the bar to read it, yes, to the bar. I'm not a big drinker and so every Monday night I arrive at the bar with a book in hand just in case I go out in poker. Before I even sat down to play my Monday game, I started reading this book and had a hard time putting it down. I immedietly wanted to know what would happen to Ramona, and how her beloved Rita Hayworth would be portrayed in the book. That first night I read half of the book before poker even started, and was dissapointed when I had to put it down to even play the game in the first place.

I really enjoyed this book, and was surprised by the ending, although I'm not going to give anything away because I really believe that you should give this book a try. It's a story of a young girl running from her past, and trying to jump directly into adult life with no knowledge about it. Her past haunts her, and her future is what will suffer because of it.

The Review


On an afternoon in the rain, a week after her father's death, Ramona meets Solomon Columbus, her future husband. Mesmerized by his odd features and his pronounced sadness, she sits with him as they share their stories while chainsmoking the afternoon away. Later drenched by the rain, Ramona leads him to her home where her lonely and damaged mother, Trixie, meets them with her disdain and contempt. After she insists that Solomon leave, he tells her that he intends to marry her daughter. They avoid Trixie by a set of back stairs that led to a old, musty attic. There they spend four days holed up in dust, heat, and smoke. Ramona and Solomon marry and she moves in with him to a more affluent home. He is deeply in love with Ramona, however Ramona's past has damaged her psyche to the point that she may be totally incapable of experiencing true love with her husband.

This book goes on to reveal more about Ramona's past and her present. She struggles with her relationship with both her husband and her mother and much of that stems from her past. She is fascinated and consumed with Rita Hayworth. It has been told that Rita Hayworth had suffered from an abusive relationship with her father. More information on the life of Rita Hayworth may be found HERE and HERE.

To avoid spoilers, I will keep the remaining details about this story the secrecy of the pages within the book. Wagman has written this book in an almost poetic pentameter. It is not a "classically" written novel, but its words bring about waves of emotion. Many of the passages brought me to a halt and gave me pause to consider my past. This book is unlike anything that I've read in the past two years and its uniqueness brought me a certain fondness for this book that I will always maintain within the walls of my heart.

Relationships between mothers and daughters are sometimes difficult at best. For the heroine of this book, her connection to her mother was one that saddened me to the core. This passage in the book, when Ramona is with her mother at lunch, was one that really affected me:

"Fine," I answered... hoping against hope on the one hand that this would be the day... and on the other... hoping that I'd have the strength to just shut up and not say anything if this wasn't the day no matter how much I craved confiding in her... telling her things... sharing... only why - why did I crave confiding in her - she was mean spirited and nasty and never gave good advice - didn't I know this, so what was the lure... as we sat there... two little kernels again - each sitting completely encased in our own little crystal ball across from each other with nothing touching... not in any way... not even the crystals... as we gazed at each other awkwardly... looking for something... each of us... only what... as the craving to tell her what was going on with Mr. Columbus began gaining... gaining... the craving to divulge... to wipe away the dividing line between her and me in a desperate effort to erase the inexorable aloneness... dissolve the irreversible separateness... the crushing urge to inhale Trixie into me or be inhaled by her that could never happen... not with her or with anyone... not ever... which was what was so terrible... we're born alone - we live alone... we die alone and when we're dead... the horror of being even more alone... completely alone... forever!"

..."What?" I asked as I looked at her... she who gave me death the same as she gave me life so that a sense of mourning was always moving between us in big wild waves... the unending sorrow of looking at your mother... the child who has to grow up and leave... the mother who has to grow old and die... she... who engenders such thoughts just be gazing at me with that thick dark eye encircled in that big pink thumbprint... because she made me... and in making me I became part of the whole long living chain that would one day snap... and that's what she gave me to... an endless universe of death... my own... hers and everyone's and everthing's... every plant and every flower... every dream and hope... but I could never mention this - oh no! not so much as a hint... I had to be forever grateful and my gratitude had to be as big and as absolute and as perfect as death itself... "

I can't say that I "enjoyed" this book as that verb seems to convey an entertainment value. Rather, this book hit my heart and hit my mind. It made me think. It made me sad. And, in many ways, it made me grateful. This is a book that will bring about many emotions within the reader, which is why I think this book sets itself apart from the pack of typical fiction.

On Sher's "Out of Ten Scale:"


Based on the impact of this literary work, for the genre Fiction, I am going to rate this book a 9 OUT OF 10.