The Good Liar takes place in a time (1969) and a place (California) that give rise to a sense of something both magical and sinister existing on the other side of the veil of ordinary life. In that ordinary life, Vivian Shipley, a young woman who works for the Adventure Map Company, becomes entranced by the stories her boss, Richard Roche, spins about his life. Their own love story is wrapped up in the fantastic journeys promised in the maps they produce, the secrets Vivian discovers about her own family, and the tales Vivian and Richard tell each other, taking them both into territory neither has explored before.
A Shortened Excerpt:
Richard, Bernie, and I have gone to the La Brea Tar Pits, on Wilshire Boulevard in the middle of Los Angeles (if there is such a thing as the middle of Los Angeles).
In the thick and heaving sea of black water—the earth’s stomach?—a bubble struggles to be born, rises up into a globe, then bursts in a quiet sigh. On his sketchpad Bernie draws a black bubble with ears and a jagged lip from which comes a balloon. “I’ll never eat sloth again,” says the balloon. The bubble looks alive, sad, and disgusting. Above it Bernie writes “the million-year-old dinosaur burp.”
“Not dinosaur,” says Richard. “The dinosaurs died off a long time before this came into being. It’s mammoth breath or saber-tooth tiger breath . . .”
“You sound like Candice,” I say. “Facts, facts, facts. We all could just sink into tar and die like the mammoths did.”
And, in spite of myself, I am thinking how Los Angeles, uneasy, exists on a deceptively solid-seeming crust on which are houses, trees, lawns, freeways, bikers, dancers, wedding parties, cemeteries; that crust of heavy earth precariously sitting on a tarry ocean, an ocean like some underground shift-shaping giant struggling for air and light, against the chains of time, its struggles reaching the surface only in quiet bursts of methane. But if it broke through entirely? And this little pit spread into miles of thick tar, engulfing everything—so the biker sank, even as he pedaled to rise, so the houses tilted and disappeared, so the bride and groom lost each other in darkness? All that reality gone, all those collective human years of reality, gone to tar. The breathing mammoth mounting his mate as she chews grass, gone to tar . . .
