The Secular vs. the Spiritual

...Yet Meloy largely succeeds in persuading us that such seemingly conflicting strains can exist within one mortal, and that Yvette is both the liar and the saint of the book's title...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "The Jewish War" Mauje Meloy's strengths as a writer are her ability to bring characters to life with quick, bold strokes, her power to evoke a controlled emotional immediacy, and her talent for creating a palpable sense of place and time...

...They have come together following the apparently senseless murder of Yvette in the shadow of St...

...In a generic sense, Liars and Saints could be any American middle-class family's tale, playing itself out over the course of a brutal and agitated half-century that leaves no one undamaged...

...The characters, often young women, have a recognizable voice and vividness...

...and the time is nearly always the present...

...Nevertheless, it is their Catholicism above all, and how it fares in a setting so inimical to religious fervor, that makes the Santerres' tale interesting...

...Because of her pregnancy, Abby refuses treatment for jaw cancer and dies soon after the delivery...

...It might be something of a stretch to see a comfortable 77-year-old California matron, proud grandmother and greatgrandmother of two illegitimate children, in an ecstatic state like a latter-day Saint Theresa...

...Meloy attempts to examine the subject by way of a motif that is present explicitly and implicitly throughout the novel—which juxtaposes being aperson of faith against being an American secularist, or what she calls a "Great Westerner...

...You would've thought she was having an illicit affair with God...

...Over the past few years, Meloy's gifts have been on full display in her short stories, which have appeared in such publications as the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and in her well-received 2002 collection, Half in Love...

...possesses a "temperament for God," in Yvette's opinion, and is, as Margot notes, the perfect distillation of all of them...

...Peter's Basilica during a church pilgrimage to Rome...

...Actually, though he doesn't know it yet, she is his first cousin, the offspring of Yvette and Teddy's second daughter, Clarissa...

...BY THE TIME the battered yet still standing Santerres gather in reconciliation for the last Christmas of a turbulent century, the final truths are revealed, no matter how painful...

...And whatever ideas emerge from exploring the intersection between the setting and the human aspiration for meaning can hardly be more than superficial...

...The Great Western notion is intensely seductive and liberating...

...Jamie is lost, the "prodigal son," but then he finds himself to his own satisfaction...

...Jamie said he wanted to have his whole family together, no secrets, no lies," writes Meloy—who deserves a lot of creditjust for keeping track of who knows what when—as the book draws to a close...

...The same features apply in general terms to Meloy's first novel, Liars and Saints...

...The powerful emotional reserve of the stories comes across more as parsimony here—until the final third of the book, where the sty le borders uncomfortably on sentimentality, as if to make up for the earlier withholding...

...the locale where their dramas unfold is usually the American West...

...This part of the book concludes in the mid-'70s, when that child, Jamie, grown into a troubled adolescent, leaves home in a rage after Yvette discovers pornographic material in his bedroom...

...That engendered in husband Teddy his own distinguishing feature, jealousy— though ultimately he appreciates "that no man was good enough to deserve the life he had been given...

...She manages the out-of-wedlock pregnancy of the older of her two daughters, Margot, so that everyone believes the child is her own— including, implausibly, her husband Teddy, the supposed father...

...Abby is determined, "unshakable in her decision...

...There he finds himself at last and settles down in unwedded bliss with his first girlfriend, now a successful sculptor, who inspired the pornographic paraphernalia that drove him out of home long ago...

...The overall narrative tenor at this stage is reminiscent of a family recounting its own history to itself: In a kind of familiar shorthand, we get generallyagreed-upon capsule summaries of its members, a consensus on the course of events, and a shared inclination toward a happy ending—or at the minimum an outcome that can be regarded as being for the best, all things considered...

...Characters are basically reduced to a few identifying traits that function rather like epithets to remind us of the main qualities relevant to each one...

...The Catholicism of the Santerres, as Meloy portrays it, has been seriously corrupted by this overwhelming force, reduced to a litany of nearly kitsch stereotypes automatically and repeatedly invoked, like Catholic guilt, and to a predictable disapproval of the permissiveness of the culture, especially among the older generation...

...the feelings they grapple with tend to involve coping with subtle betrayals in matters of love and family...

...In the first of the novel's three main sections, Yvette takes on the burden of secrecy in the late '50s...

...its impact on faith is to dilute it, rendering it mostly hollow and perfunctory...

...Jamie and his son T.J...

...Years later, in the midst of being accosted by a petty Italian thief in the most squalid circumstances, she is the one who can envision her murderer as Jesus taking her "to meet her Lord...

...It begins during World War ? with the marriage in California of Teddy Santerre and Yvette Grenier, who are of Catholic FrenchCanadian extraction...

...The latter believes "in a God like the cowboys had, out there where there weren't any churches...

...You don't owe anything to it, and you can't count on it to do anything for you, but it's the force in things...

...embark on what could be described in the most banal terms as a healing journey—a search for Jamie's true identity, punctuated by encounters recalling a feel-good movie you think you might already have seen...

...Thus, all we really learn about the two Santerre sisters is that Clarissa was "a mess and Margot a perfect little nun" (never mind her one misstep with the dance teacher...

...In this case the saga is enacted against a Western backdrop, specifically California and everything that state connotes, with a few pit stops elsewhere on the inevitable American road—but never farther east than Louisiana...

...The novel's resolution in the last section, though, represents something of an uncharacteristic indulgence on the author's part...

...And it is the clash between the spiritual and the American spirit, manifested within Yvette's passionate nature, that marks her as the most compelling character by far...

...Liars and Saints spans the secondhalf of the 20th century, moving through its highlights decade by decade...

...The second section, too, involves the birth of a baby and the fallout from the deceit surrounding its parents and their liaison...

...But where her trademark skills produce a human density and rich impact in the tight space of her stories, in a 260page novel that encompasses six generations of a family—and is broken up into 44 brief chapters—the total effect seems thin and diluted, almost like an outline...

...T.J...

...She is the one capable of having a mystical experience, of floating above her own body in prayer, even while engaged in a breathtakingly brazen act of deception—pretending to her husband to be pregnant...

...The father is Jamie, now in his mid-30s, and the mother is his "niece," 22-year-old Abby...

...Thanks to Meloy's subtlety as a writer this tragedy, the book's climax, is not freighted with melodrama, but it also does not achieve full emotional realization...

...They stop at all the major stations of Jamie's troubled life, ending up in Seattle, of course (this is the '90s...

...The theme that propels the novel forward (and backward, to Yvette's parents and Teddy's grandparents) is alluded to in the title: the deceptions family members perpetrate upon one another, often out of love and selfless good intentions, and the resulting epidemic of secrets and inevitable revelations with life-altering consequences...

...She achieves all this in a seemingly effortless way, with an accessible directness and no evident postmodern preening...

...Father Jack (a very with-it '60s-style Jesuit priest out of central casting) pretty well sums up Yvette to his former guitar student, Jamie: "She was very devout, but she radiated sex...

...It ends at the tum of the millennium with a heartwarming gathering of all the key figures—four generations of Santerres and a very modern diverse spectrum of their significant others—in the family home in Hermosa Beach...

...What customizes the Santerres' story more than any particular occurrence is the convergence of the family's Catholicism with the time and place they live in...