Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Crime
Pages: 276 kb (eOriginal)
Synopsis:
The narrator is attending counseling sessions in jail. At first, he thought it would help him kill some time, but it's getting more difficult and painful to dig deeper into the source of his violence. The portrait he presents his psychologist is disturbing.
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Maybe we're actually incapable of thinking about anything before we do it. Like I said, I never thought about quitting school, just like I never thought about killing anyone. But I did.
Being bored with something is easy. Take video games for example. Once you master all the patterns (jump, shoot, kick, punch, whatever), going through a few levels that don't include anything new will bore you to tears. Same thing for reading. A reason why I keep my TBR eclectic is that I don't want to get bored with a particular genre. Fingers Murphy's EVERYTHING I TELL YOU IS A LIE served its purpose in that regard. It's a crime novella, but not really. It's also somewhat of a coming-of-age tale, but it's nothing like those you've read before. If John Irving got hooked on Ramen and The Sopranos, he could've written such a slippery and tortuous tale of redemption.
EVERYTHING I TELL YOU IS A LIE, is a prison story that doesn't have anything to do with prison, but everything with the key points that bring a person to detention. Not necessarily crime, but traumatic moments of exposure to violence. There was this point Murphy wanted to get to and the setup is brilliant. In psychology terms, EVERYTHING I TELL YOU IS A LIE, is the last line that leads to a patient's breakthrough. The digging of a buried memory that's tainting everything else. It's definitely unique. If you think the premise is ripping off Tony Soprano, think again. It's borrowing from the show, but it has legs of its own. The narrator isn't a career criminal. He's fell down that rabbit hole of violence and wants to figure his way out. The patient/doctor relationship plays a pivotal role in this novella and the fact that it's believable makes the whole story work.
This is not a story about love at first sight. If anything, it is the extreme opposite. There may never have been any love at all. I can't say now for sure. Perhaps we redefine our emotions as we age, with what we once thought of as love, or grief, or sorrow, being replaced with new-mostly more extreme-definitions as our emotional range gets stretched at the edges.
As much as I loved the endearing narrator, who works very hard at putting his life in perspective, I thought the way it ended cast a bizarre shadow on the whole story. It left me with a doubt in my mind, as whether I had properly read the story or not. As if there was something evident I didn't get. Anyway, I liked EVERYTHING I TELL YOU IS A LIE. It was an interesting exercise on how time and introspection can change your perspective on what made you who you are. It eludes every possible patterns of crime fiction, or at least those I know about. I thought it warranted a deeper narrative and that it read like the character bio of a great novel, but it was good. It has the seed of something great, but it turned out to be just a good, off-beat crime story.
THREE STARS