Davies is less interested in the bourgeois fabric of life—where McLaughlin is like Ibsen, whose plays are cluttered with objects, Davies is closer to Chekhov, whose characters act on a near-empty stage ... There is nothing superfluous in these pages, and yet Davies, whose characters’ humor carries the reader through considerable agony, allows cheerfully for life’s banality ... It would be easy, under the sway of this mild and familiar parental wit, to underestimate the ambition of the book, both formally and emotionally. Like Akhil Sharma’s remarkable Family Life, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself presents the writer, and the reader, with an unusual challenge: its tragedy takes place in its opening pages ... Davies handles time with particular care ... Even in sentences pared down to the essentials, Davies’s nameless and hence faceless characters (in the way that McLaughlin’s powerful Chalk Sculpture is faceless) shift the quotidian (not just toys and childhood fads, but intimacy, sex, and masturbation) into the universal register of myth.
Davies’ overall position is resolutely pro-choice: The 'lie' of the title, which comes from a quotation by the writer Anais Nin, is shame. But he also wants to show how the decision to have an abortion lingers ... The novel’s latter pages fall a little flat as Davies strives to reconcile this handwringing with the dad’s growing child and declining father ... The heart of the novel, though, is a piercing depiction of a marriage under intense pressure ... Resolution is important in novels, but it can be a cheat in novels about parenting. The anxiety might alleviate, Davies knows, but it never quite goes away.
...piercing and expansive ... A Lie isn’t only a novel about the shame, sorrow (and, yes, relief) that sometimes accompanies an abortion decision. Davies also tackles what comes next in painstaking detail ... While this synopsis might sound like yet another run-of-the-mill ode-to-parenting story, albeit with an abortion lead-in, it’s quite the opposite. Because the book is told in third person from the bumbling father’s unsentimental and often painfully honest point of view ... Also of note is Davies’ stark and refreshingly realistic portrait of the couple’s marriage ... a deftly written, bittersweet and thought-provoking book.
With insight and often acerbic wit, the balance of this brief novel, narrated from the father's point of view, follows the family through the early years of the son's childhood ... The father's attempt to seek expiation for his part in the abortion decision leads him to volunteer as an escort at an abortion clinic, a decision that produces some of the novel's most poignant and darkly funny moments ... a bittersweet story, a tender and touching novel that's unafraid to wear its heart, and its humor, on its sleeve.
...the self-flagellation is so intense and unremitting that the book quickly comes to feel like a purely therapeutic exercise ... What matters isn’t the technicality of 'truth' but the impression conveyed to the reader, and the overwhelming sense here is that this is not a work of literature, in which experience has been transmuted by language and reflection, but the unmediated confessions of a troubled stranger ... Mr. Davies is a good writer...but the wounds he exposes in this work are so raw and open that the only proper response for those who don’t know him personally is sorrowful silence.
...excellent ... Davies brilliantly describes the quotidian aspects of raising a baby ... Though the child comes across as an abstraction rather than a fully fleshed-out character, the eloquence of Davies’ writing will make readers sympathize with a father trying to be a good parent and a good person ... a poetic meditation on the nature of regret and a couple’s enduring love through myriad difficulties. It’s a difficult but marvelous book.
[Davies] attempts something new: an unnamed third-person narrator, a contemporary story delivered in the fashion of a prose-poem, and a meandering style. It is a candid look at fatherhood ... It becomes obvious that the author has embraced many of the tips he advocates to his writing students: Flesh out your characters. Choose your words carefully ... the father reveals on another occasion: 'He once told students his goal in writing: I am trying to break your heart.' That perhaps best sums up the reaction a reader has upon finishing the book.
...never-knowing haunts Ho Davies’ (The Fortunes, 2016) brief, admittedly autobiographical new novel, a raw, intimate look at a couple’s journey into parenthood, from the choice to abort their first pregnancy after a diagnosis of mosaicism to the arrival of a son after a difficult birth ... a resonant treatise on identity, family, grieving, writing, and 'the taking and telling of other people’s stories.'
Davies does a lot of due diligence to counter charges of appropriation...At times this caution feels awkward, like one of those forfeits where you have to turn around and touch your toes each time you say something ... But there is nothing awkward or anxious about Davies’s clear-eyed chronicling of the abortion, its aftermath, his son’s birth and first few difficult years as the child struggles with developmental milestones ... Davies never lets himself off the hook, setting down all of his compromised, human responses to the challenges of parenthood, no matter how private or ignoble ... His deceptively simple, pared-back style is ideal for detailing difficult emotions ... Sadly, Davies loses his nerve as the son gets older...Towards the end the good writer is sacrificed to the good parent. The son is a central character, but after infancy the details dry up and we struggle to see him as a real person. Perhaps most problematically, the transition he makes to apparent normality is elided ... For most of this ambitious book, Davies’s bold tell-all policy makes for moving and compelling reading. He has gone so much further than most: taken off his clothes, walked right to the end of the wubbering gangplank, stood there shivering for all to see. And although, finally, he fails to take the plunge, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is still admirable for the brave new things it has to say about shame, regret, fatherhood and love.
...rigorously truthful ... It’s a tribute to Davies’ skill and sensitivity that we feel how much they still love each other despite bad sex, jealousies, and endless worry over their son ... A radiant conclusion affirms the daunting cost and overwhelming rewards of raising a child. Perfectly observed and tremendously moving: This will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere.
...thoughtful ... Davies explores their emotions in unflinching honesty ... While an anticlimactic, philosophical conclusion somewhat undermines the narrator’s character development after he embraces his role as a father, it resonates with the key theme of paradoxes.
