THE MUSEUM OF LIES

A poet attempts to make sense of his dysfunctional history in Hunt’s comic novel.

Cary Scott never stood a chance. He stumbled upon his beloved grandfather’s dead body on his first day of kindergarten. His merciless mother dressed him up as a woman to humiliate him in front of his Cub Scout troop. His closeted father ran off with his closeted uncle. His grandmother forced enemas on him when she decided he was constipated. In high school, he was so terrified of gym class—where he was caught with an erection in the boys’ shower—that he faked stigmata to be excused. Cary’s one moment in the sun came when he wrote a poem about a streaker that got published in the local paper, then adapted into a top-10 hit by country artist Kitty Belle Crawford. He has never followed up on that success, however, and 10 years later he is an obese, single, self-loathing poet with no other published work and a severe eating disorder. Leaping back and forth between childhood traumas and the yo-yo dieting and personal humiliations of his adulthood, Hunt’s novel follows Cary’s unlikely journey toward self-understanding via recovered memory therapy—though whether the memories he ends up recovering are true (and what they might mean for his sense of himself) is not so cut and dried. The writing is as psychologically acute as it is funny, as here when Cary attends an eating disorder conference: “If I were a food, I’d be devil’s food cake,” he explains during an exercise. “I’m sweet and people should like me, but liking me is forbidden. I’m dark and black inside and am quite bad for you if you take me in anything other than small doses. That’s because I’m loaded with fat. Fat and sin.” Hunt is a masterful storyteller, escalating his protagonist’s misadventures to the point of farcical truth. Cary feels just responsible enough for his predicaments to make him a compellingly tragic figure, someone whose larger-than-life problems feel both real and searingly relevant to the reader.

A funny, dark, and deeply human novel about what shapes us as human beings.