Liars and Saints

Amazon.com
Opening with a wedding and ending with a funeral, Maile Meloy stuffs everything imaginable in between, and manages to maintain a cool, elegant prose style throughout. Liars and Saints, Meloy's debut novel, following her story collection Half in Love, chronicles the life of the Santerre family, who sin with the gusto of true Catholics. Written in a series of short story-like vignettes, the family's saga is told in turn by every member, from Yvette the matriarch down to T.J., her great-grandson. We start out with a relatively run of the mill family secret, when in the 1950s Yvette sends daughter Margot off to a French convent for the duration of her teenage pregnancy. As the decades pass, the transgressions become wilder and more melodramatic, as if the Santerres are trying to keep up with the times by way of their naughty acts. What makes the novel work is that all the while, Meloy maintains a quiet, slightly wry tone: illicit lovemaking and bloody mary mixing are recounted with the same equanimity. She also gets just right the tone of each era. When Yvette's other daughter Clarissa marries a jolly lawyer in the early 60s, he sends a telegram to Yvette: "HITCHED. THANKS FOR BEAUTIFUL DAUGHER. PROGENY PROMISED TO POPE." Likewise, in the 1970s the characters talk just groovy enough, and the 80s have a wised-up ring to them. Most multi-generational sagas are dull forays into sentimentalism, but in the aptly titled Liars and Saints, Meloy has written a corker. --Claire Dederer


From Publishers Weekly
The consolations of ardent faith, as well as the harsh demands of religious dogma, supply the leitmotifs of this dazzling novel of a Catholic family's life over five decades. Meloy, whose collection of short fiction, Half in Love, earned rave reviews last year, writes with wisdom and compassion about the secret guilt that shadows three generations of the Santerre family. Yvette Grenier and Teddy Santerre marry in California in 1945, just before Teddy ships out to the Pacific. Their wartime separation sparks Teddy's fears of Yvette's infidelity, and when naive Yvette is moved to confess an experience of sexual temptation to her priest, his strict penalty for her "sin of omission" creates enduring tension in the marriage. When one of their daughters gives birth at age 16, Yvette contrives to pass off the baby boy as her own son, convinced that God has chosen her to bear this burden. The strict injunctions of Catholic doctrine and the well-meaning deceit that follows trigger an intricate chain of events that finds history repeating itself in the next generation, bringing heartbreaking sacrifice and spiritual reconciliation. Meloy's unerring mastery of narrative is remarkable. The disciplined economy and resonant clarity of her prose allow her to present a complex story in swift, lean chapters. The alternating points of view of eight main characters shine with authenticity and illuminate the moral complexities felt by each generation. The rich emotional chiarascuro and fine psychological insight of this haunting novel mark Meloy as a writer of extraordinary talent.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Meloy is an outstanding short story writer, as evident in her collection, Half in Love (2002), and her signature clarity and concreteness also grace her first novel, in which a series of episodic scenes forms a family album that documents not the usual gatherings and celebrations but, rather, covert moments of overwhelming lust, confusion, fear, and revelation. Indeed, the Santerres, starting with lovely Yvette and uptight Teddy, a World War II marine, are hardly a typical Catholic family. When their eldest daughter gets pregnant in high school, Yvette concocts an elaborate ruse and convinces Teddy that the baby is theirs. Similar secret begettings, concealed identities, and hidden anguish occur in each subsequent generation as Yvette becomes increasingly religious and Teddy struggles to love his rule-breaking progeny. As Meloy boldly dramatizes one family's labyrinthine lies and maneuverings, acts of generosity and forbearance, folly and tragedy, she deftly probes the parameters of faith and love. In its finer moments, Meloy's sexy, circular, five-decade-spanning tale transcends its soap-opera tendencies and calls to mind the work of Antonya Nelson and Andre Dubus. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
The New York Times Book Review A spectacular first novel.

The Boston Globe A tour de force.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present, as they navigate a succession of life-altering events - through the submerged emotion of the fifties, the recklessness and excess of the sixties and seventies, and the reckonings of the eighties and nineties. In a family driven by jealousy and propriety as much as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation, and fiercely protected secrets gradually drive the Santerres apart. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic lives, it takes astonishing courage and compassion to bring them back together.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Meloy follows four tangled generations of the Santerre family, French Canadian Catholics who settle in Southern California during World War II. That sounds like a saga, yet the book is only 260 pages long -- and yet again you don't feel you've missed a thing. The things you haven't missed include life on an aircraft carrier in the war's Pacific theater, dance lessons at a Catholic girls' school, illicit sex leading to an illegitimate pregnancy, the Beatles, smoking pot in Hawaii, the Kennedy assassination, miscarriage, light bondage, a couple of cross-country road trips, political campaigns, divorce, incest (sort of), another illegitimate pregnancy, cancer, same-sex romance, a toothless old man who claims he can control reality with his mind, improbable reunions, apostasy and murder.

Miraculously, this doesn't feel sketchy or rushed, and it doesn't boil over into soap opera. Instead, Meloy keeps the tone light and wry as she teases out the legacy of a tiny incident -- a piece of advice offered by a well-meaning but clueless priest -- that compounds over the years into a sizable quantity of lies and bad faith. — Laura Miller

The Los Angeles Times

There are more twists and turns here than in The Thornbirds or even "All My Children," and yet Meloy somehow makes every sentence of this book wholly believable. This is fearless, unapologetic melodrama, put across with evanescent insight and hard-won sentimentality. — Mark Rozzo

The Washington Post

In a novel that spans generations and tells so many stories within the story, point of view becomes a lifeline to connect us to the characters. Maloy's impressive writing seamlessly incorporates this POV shift from chapter to chapter; one never feels overly jolted when the new voice picks up the thread. The consistently distant and detached tone, reminiscent of Evan Connell's novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, is heartbreaking in its careful observations. — Carol S. Briggs

San Francisco Chronicle

Remarkable...Bittersweet, wise, with a fantastic sense of character and history...Fifteen minutes after opening this book, a reader is apt not just to care about the Santerres but also to feel like one of them.

Boston Globe