Book Review: The Truth About You by Susan Lewis

Whatever else you hold against Susan Lewis — the “best selling British author” who’s written more than 30 romantic novels — a stagnant plot can’t be one of the charges. Not one leg in this multipeded book lags.

In The Truth About You, the 400-page family drama, you have all variety of a food court and all the makings of a masala film. Now if only a movie producer would pick up the plot and get a half decent screenwriter to adapt (rework?) the many themes, by next year this time we could have a tear jerker ‘coming soon at a cine-ma near you’.

The litany of themes running in parallel include adultery, abandonment, a passel of half-children and step-children — not the same thing — all with their own issues, a degree of child pornography, cancer, Alzheimer’s, jealousy, insecurity, bad manners borne out of an abundance of wealth and privilege — it doesn’t stop.

The Truth About You is bleeding heart central.

Lainey Hollingsworth is a mother of two, well, three — she’s also stepmother of one. She’s a devoted daughter, mother and homemaker, whose husband Tom is a big shot author, constantly travelling all over and visiting the sets of TV productions. Lainey’s divorced, unemployed best friend Stacy, who later finds a job, is almost always in the house and comes across as a bit of a hand maid. In the eld-erly demographic, there’s Peter. Lainey adores Peter, her adoptive father, who has Alzheimer’s, lives with them and contri-butes to keeping the ambience around the dining table benign. There’s also a dog, Sherman, old but loyal, who is basically Peter’s guard dog, although he needs help climbing the stairs — 
one of the more insightful, fulsome character sketches is the dog.

They all live in a charming mansion on the outskirts of London called Bannerleigh Cross. Bannerleigh Cross is a centre of activity, especially the kitchen.

“The kitchen itself, which sprawled across most of the back of the house with several double French windows opening on to the patio, a hopeful-looking knot garden and 
the fields beyond, was still the true heart of the place, though it was twice its former size after absorbing the old back parlour, butler’s pantry and garden room into its embrace…”

Reams of description are the proxies for emotional depth to any of these one-dimensional characters.

“The kitchen was a place to eat, watch TV, do homework, catch up on emails, stare at nothing if you were Peter, and occasionally relax on huge sofas around a roaring log fire with friends… and opinions that needed to be shared if you were Tom and Lainey.”

The plot winds its way through myste-rious text messages from old lovers, threatening the sanctuary that is Tom and Lainey’s allegedly rock-solid 16-year-old period of wedded bliss. Add to this, Lainey — who is adopted and whose birth mother was Italian — wants to discover her roots. So off she goes, booking tickets to Italy for her whole family, kids and even their friends. “My treat,” she says. Money is 
obviously no issue.

So as a change of scene — from the kitchen at Bannerleigh Cross to Tuscan hillsides — there’s a bit of Italian tourism thrown in towards the last 200 pages.

This is, of course, also the time when suitably Italian-sounding characters, Via Guglielmi and Carlotta Calduzzi, pop out of the log fire. No one seems to be eating pizzas and spaghetti Bolognese though.

Food mentions, come to think of it, are sparse. At one point though, back in the kitchen, in a typical Hollingsworth home scene, Tom is teaching one son to flip pancakes, another son is dragging his feet to the fridge to take out a jug of orange 
juice, while yet another offspring, a girl this time, Tierney, is busy narr-owing eyes and calling everything ‘lame’.

You want to slap these children. In layman’s terms, they’re called spoilt brats. So that’s good on the author — eliciting feeling from a reader, even if the feelings are mostly violent.

Eyes are constantly being narrowed in this book. Age no bar. Jaws tighten far fewer times. And if you count the number of occasions someone gets a text message or leaves a voicemail and you remove all those references, the book will automatically be condensed by 200 pages.

With money in no short supply, there’s an overuse of brand references. Anything ‘designer’ is a crutch for what is desirable — and, worrisomely, seen as normal. Phones don’t just beep — iPhones beep. Bags are necessarily DKNY, kitchen appliances are AGA. A Chloe bracelet is viewed as a ‘well researched’ birthday gift. You’ve got to wonder at the sanity of the premise, this self-indulgent culture.

Are these people based on people we know? I believe the line between character and caricature just blurred a wee bit more.

nivriti@khaleejtimes.com