Customer Reviews

Lies of the Saints

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Lies of the Saints is a rich, wonderful collection of stories! Erin McGraw is a well published story writer. Several of the stories here first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and for good reason. Each story is a separate gem, finely tuned, always surprising, and often very funny as well. Erin McGraw has deep affection for her characters, who range from a radio talk show host beseiged on air by the attentions of her ex-husband to a surburban housewife who inexplicably begins to perform miracles (to the dismay of her family) to a much misused divorcee who returns home to her drunken, unwelcoming father only to find personal freedom in a most unlikely place. Three of the stories are interlinked, relating a family history of sorts. These are highly readable, literary stories in which not one word is wasted.

Look, the world is full of writers or people who write. Erin McGraw is a notch above this fray. She is plain spoken in her style. She is sharp in her delivery. Her stories are great moments. You could learn a lot by reading her stories. The first thing you'd learn is what great writing looks like in book form.
It's dumb, base and so very Hemingway of me, but; when reading her stuff, I think about bullfighting. What's up with that? Read this book and tell me. I want to know.

I randomly picked up this short story collection while browsing the "M"'s in the Fiction section of my local library. The title sounded intrigueing (I grew up Catholic) and I decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself laughing and smiling through the first few stories, and before I knew it, I was drawn into the characters and Erin McGraw's sardonic and honest prose style. Then the last few stories--the title tryptich--nearly broke my heart. (I actually had to skim "Saint Tracy" and "Russ" for fear that I would start crying--I was on public transport at the time.) Although I didn't feel that all the stories were equally strong, the ones that I liked I really loved. The collection is well worth a read, and one hopes that Erin McGraw continues her unique brand of story-telling.

I was assigned this book during my senior year in high school, in large part because its author lived in Ohio, had previously taught in Cincinnati, and was being courted to come speak on writing and literature at our school. (She never did.) I mention this because it's hard to give full credit to a book you're forced to read. That admitted, I recently did re-read some of Lies of the Saints after I found packed away with some other high school artifacts and my general opinion didn't change very much in the course of a decade.

I really don't think there is a lot to be gained from this book. I found the plots extremely weak, the characters who people it to be shallow and in the end I can't say I felt moved by the themes within it that evolved up to one last story about life after loss. McGraw did have one decent short story here but the sadness of a plot that concerns a blind dog isn't much of a legacy to go on. She even kills off (not a spoiler to reveal that) the one decent person in the collection, the dad of this late-twentieth-century Catholic clan. She also can't seem to decide whether she wants this anthology to be about life's tortured mundane side or the miraculous that she hints lies waiting to appear at random moments. (The loaves an fishes story set in a suburban kitchen seemed just silly to me.)

Maybe I'm being too hard on Erin McGraw but this collection truly bothered me by being a rare literary waste of time.

I personally did not like Lies of the Saints. It was too wordy. Erin McGraw is a good writer, but lies of the saints is NOT a good book. The small plots try to take surprise endings, but only disappoint the reader with their total strangeness. It is also very difficult to read, with so many different characters, that once you start to get into the plot, a whole new story begins.....