Gorgeous Lies

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About Gorgeous Lies

Product Description Acclaimed by critics, Martha McPhee's debut Bright Angel Time established her as a dazzling new talent in American fiction; she fulfills her promise and breaks ambitious new ground with Gorgeous Lies. Charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying, and the tribe he heads-his five children, his wife's three, and their uniting child, Alice-has returned to Chardin, the farm where they grew up and played out Anton's vision of communal living. They had been famous for being the new American blended family, their utopian lifestyle chronicled by film crews and reporters. But as Anton grows weaker, the hurts and betrayals of those years boil to the surface, and the children find themselves reliving the knotty intimacies they share as they struggle to make their peace with Anton. With shimmering prose and an acutely observant eye, McPhee has created a portrait of an era and a family that explores the limits, and obligations, of love. Review "[McPhee]''s prose captures the Chardin mood: Elegant and airy, it seems to levitate even the grubbiest details." ( Los Angeles Time Book Review) "An unusually strong novel [that] explores the wild frontier of domestic life." ( O Magazine) "McPhee is a sensuous stylist." ( Elle) "It''s easy to see why the charismatic figures from BRIGHT ANGEL TIME would not loosen their grip on this author." ( Washington Post Book World) "Gorgeous Lies is a lovely meditation on mortality . . . Brilliantly and convincingly done." (Larry McMurtry) "When McPhee strikes the right rhythm, you don''t so much read her prose as live inside it." ( Santa Fe New Mexican) "I loved this book. Martha McPhee plainly ranks as one of our country''s best young writers." (Tim O'Brien author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED) "McPhee brings sensitivity and insight to her account.... She is an immensely gifted novelist." ( Albany Times-Union) "Fine work: A moving portrait of a foolish, foul-hearted, but impossibly innocent man." (starred review Kirkus) "Deftly depicts individuals dealing with old memories and new problems." ( Dallas Morning News) About the Author Martha McPhee is the author of Bright Angel Time, a New York Times Notable book, and coauthor with Jenny and Laura McPhee of Girls. She teaches at Hofstra University and lives in New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE Promise THEY LOVED ANTON. Every single one of them. Alice most of all. She was his youngest. Eve loved him. She was his wife. Agnes loved him. She was his ex-wife. Lily loved him. She was his lover. They all loved him. The little beady-eyed preacher woman, the woman who sold ducks, Eve's divorce lawyer who always had a different girl on his arm, the Strange couple from down the road. (That was their name, Strange, and they were strange, with dramatic drawn-out English accents, though they were not English-he a poet and a banker, she an aging actress.) The Furey kids loved him, of course. He was their father. The Cooper girls tried to hate him, but what they really wanted was for him to love them. Love them big and wide and infinitely, like a father. The Cooper girls were not his children. Once, they had all lived at Chardin-all the children, that is. Long ago in the 1970s. It was called Chardin for the Omega Point, and it was Anton's dream that he could create a home that was a perfect meeting place of the human and the divine: a divine milieu, the setting for a profound and mystical vision of God. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was his preferred philosopher. He upset the Catholic Church, scaring its thinkers into thinking about his attempt to combine evolutionary theory and Christian theology in a seamless whole. Chardin sprawled on a hill, the highest point in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, blessed with hundred-mile views and lapped by seas of green fields rolling into cornfields and forests with creeks slinking through them. And up there, there was a lot of sky with all its sto