ATTENTION-SEEKING BEHAVIOR

A meditation on truth and its consequences, told by a consummate liar.

The narrator of this slim, scholarly, sexy novel has been a liar since childhood. Raised in Athens until the age of 16, her seamlessly multilingual upbringing, combined with an unusual degree of independence necessitated by her mother’s long illness and eventual death, impressed upon her a need to control the narrative of her life—by inventing it. By lying, in other words, which she does fluently, constantly, and largely without guilt. As a young adult living in London, she has created a compartmentalized life in which her flatmates, editors at freelance jobs, the director of her stalled master’s program in writing, and rotation of simultaneous sexual partners all believe different things about her past, present, and plans for the future. Then she meets Normal Ben, at first another pleasurable two-week interlude on her strictly organized schedule, whose stolid security in his own identity, quick wit, kindness, and sexual chemistry with the narrator cause her to let the relationship linger and grow. At around the same time, she starts a correspondence with Anna, an American journalist, that develops into an economic and intellectual affiliation. When Anna gives her a more involved assignment, the narrator finds herself obsessively cataloging transcriptions of a particularly nasty “he said, she said” rape case wherein both participants’ act of speaking their truth has erased any chance that this truth might exist in an objective fashion. Exposure to this story triggers a complex renegotiation of her own abuse at the hands of an ex-lover, which has ramifications on her relationship with Normal Ben that are far more nuanced than being caught in either a lie or in the slippery, non-negotiable truth. The novel is told by a relentlessly confident narrator who intersperses her accounts of sex, domination, control, and the interplay of power with passages of scholarly nonfiction detailing psychologist Paul Ekman’s attempt to develop a universal catalog of emotions and the ramifications of that work on policing in the U.S. and in the U.K. The result is an emotional novel fraught with science; a scientific novel supported by sensation; and a rare admission that the truth is true not because it happened, but because it was believed.

Complex and enigmatic; a book that defies both expectations and definition.