You might decide to lie, or you might decide, instead, to embellish or manipulate or stretch your words. The difference, when you’re moving your lips, should be clear. Somewhere between a loose equivocation and a much bolder fabrication is a threshold that, I hope, is a psychological hurdle. Even though many people do justify evasion and obfuscation and misrepresentation—those same people find it difficult to completely invent stories without a bit of internal dissonance. If you can’t catch your own deceptions and dishonesty and doublespeak, it is called delusion.
Yet I do think that complete invention is rare. Nearly everyone prefers to keep at least a grasp of reality when they speak, let’s say, without precision. If you merely stretch the truth, if you merely exaggerate, if you merely misconstrue, you might sleep in peace, convinced that you’re perfectly righteous. And with a little determination, with a touch of self-deception, you can even persuade yourself that you’re not lying. Perhaps you’re simply misleading? Perhaps you’re avoiding what’s surely hurtful? Isn’t that justified? When you cross the line and tell an audacious lie, alas, it is much harder to rationalize. To tell a brazen and blatant lie requires a genetic cocktail that removes every ounce of dissonance from your face and all traces of empathy from your mind. Although it does help to persuade yourself about the truth of your fiction. If the best liars don’t know they’re lying, then the first con of every con artist appears in the morning mirror.
His stories were so good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.
This good storyteller is Tom Ripley from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, who is one of the most artful con artists in literature, partly because he does, on multiple occasions, fully inhabit the role that he steals. He’s a swindler, an impersonator, a bit of a sneak, occasionally a scam artist, a forger, always directing at least one fraud, but never a dupe. On the spectrum of those who stretch the truth and those who create fictional worlds with lies, Tom lives, serene and carefree, in the latter. He does more than steal identities—he embodies the behaviors and mannerisms of his victims. In his novels, he’s a slippery character, forever purloining the personas of other characters, never quite content with just one role. Each new identity makes him believe that he’s a new person, however, with each new identity feeling, in his mind, perfectly true.
While con artists are forever busy trying on new costumes, it is worth remembering that the typical person struggles to inhabit just one identity—they feel uncomfortable at a dinner party, unsure about how to act with a new friend, confused about the rules during an unexpected meeting. Just wearing one skin is difficult enough for most people. Just attempting to be honest and articulate in a way that feels genuine is its own struggle. The social world has countless norms and little codes and nearly all of these expectations are both unspoken and shiftable, with what’s appropriate for Friday evening not quite suitable for Monday morning, and a good amount of effort is spent, for the typical person who struggles to fit in, trying to predict what’s correct. The next greeting might be a smile, a handshake, a hug, a kiss on the cheek, or something that’s off the usual menu, and there’s at least a flash—for even the most confident person—of decision.
Yet that’s not necessarily true for the Tom Ripleys of the world. There’s no moment of decision, nor any concern about decorum, when you’re inhabiting a role, or when you’re following a script. When your objective is to trigger a behavior—to influence, to tempt, to charm—the correct behavior is any behavior that brings you a bit closer to your effect. The expert con artist is perfectly capable of maintaining eye contact and peering straight through you while speaking fictions. And this leaves a wonderful paradox about sincerity: the driven con artist feels more comfortable while they lie than the typical person does while they tell the truth.
And it is this separation between mask and face, or the distinction between what’s shown externally and what’s felt internally, that’s such a ideal topic for literature. In a narrative you can spot the space between intention and action, and that’s true whether it is a Victorian novel of manners where there’s calculation underneath every gesture, or whether it is a modern psychological thriller where every word implies danger. There’s no need for a con artist to appear, as the characters will almost always have enough trouble keeping their thoughts and actions aligned. Nuances in meaning quickly become the crucial elements in nearly all narratives—because a novel where everyone tells the truth and acts kindly and says what they mean and enacts out their intentions isn’t much of a novel. Which means that all novels really do end up as spy novels—as described by Ian McEwan—because every writer withholds, denies, and misleads just a like a spy, toying with the primary currency of both con artist and novelist: information.
And when you play with words for long enough—whether you’re an aspiring con artist, or an aspiring novelist—you do begin to grasp the potency of creation. A con artist like Tom Ripley uses fictional words to direct and prod and influence those unfortunate enough to hear, and the novelist, too, creates reality from sentences on the page. For the novelist, to write a good sentence is to conjure a picture in the reader’s mind, it is to shape reality, to distort mere lines on the page into sensations and reactions, with the subtlest shifts in tone and almost incidental shifts in diction prompting dramatic changes in meaning. And of course this sensation of control is irresistible for most writers. You spot it in the horror writer who relishes triggering fear, or in the thriller writer who relishes forcing you to keep flipping pages. What the novelist feels just might be similar to the intoxication that the con artist feels—the power of speaking false words into the world and watching as they become real.
But readers aren’t allowed to be passive during this show. Readers aren’t mere victims of the novelist as con artist, innocently susceptible to the charms of a sentence. Reading is always an active, generative act, because a numb or indifferent or sleepy reader can’t create a scene in their mind. If there’s seduction on the page, the reader is a participant, just as the victim of a con artist—as goes a very old trope—must be willing. There’s no deception if there’s no desire to believe.
A novelist requires good readers, those with analytical skills, discernment, patience, and that desire to believe in fictional truths. You’re compelled to participate in your deception: you can be passive while listening to music or while viewing a painting, but you can’t be passive while reading a novel. Yet that’s also why reading is the most intimate art, as the sentences provide a direction to your labor—just like a con artist feeding you lies, you can relax, content in letting the narrative arrange your thoughts. Sentences don’t simply give you information, they direct the speed and sequence of what’s inside your mind, with the writer’s pen deciding what comes next.
Other art forms don’t even attempt to replicate this almost mystical quality of narrative. As only through narrative can you inhabit the moment-by-moment internal thoughts of another person, with your thought directed by the sentences on the page, in a manner that’s nothing if not eerie, as you must, for a moment, dwell in a fictional world, wear a new skin, and accept each new word as true. A good novelist—just like a good con artist—feeds you fictional words to shape your reality. But you shouldn’t forget that you’re the author of the scene inside your head as you look at the squiggles on the page—the spooky quality of fiction only arrives if you participate as both the con artist and the conned.
I remember reading Nicholas Evans's "The Horse Whisperer" years ago and enjoying the world I imagined from the novel. Later, I saw the movie with Robert Redford, and while the movie got some stuff right, it didn't come close to the world I imagined from the words. The same with Haruf's "Our Souls at Night." Splendid little novel, and while the movie (again with Redford) was fine, it didn't match the images in my head. So whether the novelist cons us with words, or invites us to be collaborators in a fictional world, I think it's a trip worth taking.
Well done! I should probably bring myself to my reading more...as sometimes I feel lazy like I’m just expecting the author to do all the work but I should and can definitely participate more - really enjoyed this!