Editor's choice: 'The Liar's Wife'

By Elizabeth Taylor contact the reporter

Fiction Literature Books and Magazines Mary Gordon Books

In this week's editor's choice, Tribune lit editor Elizabeth Taylor looks at "The Liar's Wife" by Mary Gordon

"Heat was a presence, a companion, but not, as in daytime, an oppressor." It's a summer evening, and a yellow Frito-Lay delivery truck across the street looks all wrong parked on this suburban Connecticut street.

Sipping wine, the narrator of the title novella in Mary Gordon's collection "The Liar's Wife" is content standing on the lawn outside her home. She has enjoyed a long and happy second marriage, raised happy children and enjoyed a fulfilling career as a scientist. But the reappearance of her first husband, now an itinerant 75-year-old musician driving the truck, and his tacky girlfriend inspires ruminations.

The events that follow lead her to a flash of insight: "Without Johnny, she wouldn't have known, really, who she was. Because he had taught her who she was not."

Together, this quartet of novellas fit together. They refract light on the turning points, the flashes of understanding that can elevate life. These stories — about Europeans in America and Europeans in Europe — are both contemporary and drawn from the pages of history.

In "Simone Weil in New York," the collection's second novella, a young expatriate mother accidentally encounters Simone Weil, who was her math teacher in France. As a student, she was devoted to Weil and saw her as a genius. Now grown, she comes to see Weil's selfishness and her perverse anti-Semitism.

The following novella, "Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana," is also set during the World War II era. A retired 90-year-old physician looks back on the time that two emigre teachers asked him to introduce Thomas Mann at his Gary high school. Bill Morton saw this event in 1939 as the "greatest day of my life."

Years later, he runs into Mann on the streets of Chicago, and the Nobel laureate treats him with contempt. Morton muses: "He believes it was his duty to wake us up from our stupid sleep, pulling off our blindfolds, unstopping our ears. The waking was a shock, a laceration, but it was one we needed."

The novellas build on one another, with each novella considering the question of what one does to live life fully. In the final one, "Fine Arts," a precocious student comes of age in Catholic schools, has an affair with her married mentor and goes to Italy to research little-known 15th century sculptor Matteo Civitali. There she falls in love with the study of art and finally understands that she is worthy of joy.

Elizabeth Taylor is the Tribune's literary editor at large

"The Liar's Wife"

By Mary Gordon, Pantheon, 304 pages, $25.95