Sacrament of Lies
By Elizabeth Dewberry (Blue Hen Books, 229 pp., $23.95)
When artists hook up with each other in a way that reaches public attention—as, say, when they actually get married—it’s almost impossible for their fans not to search for the companion artist’s influence in the other’s work. It doesn’t hurt that people who are extravagantly in love like to intertwine themselves in public ways. Thus Elizabeth Dewberry dedicates her new novel, Sacrament of Lies, with these words: “For Robert Olen Butler, my husband and best friend,” while Robert Olen Butler dedicates his new novel, Fair Warning (Atlantic Monthly Press), with an echo: “For Elizabeth Dewberry, my wife and best friend.” Really, it’s hard not to cringe a little.
Unfortunately, the first few pages of Sacrament of Lies will have Dewberry fans doing worse than cringing. Butler’s big on juicy sex scenes—he claims that in his novel They Whisper he writes about sex in a way that no writer has ever written about it before. So it comes as no great surprise to readers playing the let’s-find-Butler’s-influence game that Dewberry gets less than 15 pages into her new novel before Grayson Guillory, the protagonist, has hiked up her skirt, ditched her panties and is straddling someone on her sofa: “I kissed him softly on the lips, and when he kissed me back, his breath was warm on my skin. I pulled him close, and soon, he came inside me and we were ignoring my father together.” OK, time to cringe some more.
If Dewberry isn’t exactly writing about sex in a way that it’s never been written about before, she’s writing about it from a disaffected woman’s point of view, which provides at least an interesting setting. In this scene, the protagonist’s lover—the man she intends to marry and her powerful father’s right-hand man—is actually watching the news while all this sweating is going on. (It’s Louisiana, so there’s plenty of sweating in this book, even in the non-sex scenes.) Grayson’s father, the governor of the state, is giving a televised press conference, and in Louisiana politics are always more interesting than sex.
What’s also more interesting than even sex on the sofa while the Daddy smiles from the television across the room is what Sacrament of Lies turns out to be: not only a deeply affecting literary thriller, but also a completely compelling and absolutely original retelling of Hamlet.
The parallels to Shakespeare’s masterpiece are overt and unavoidable, although all the main characters’ genders have been reversed: Grayson’s father, the de facto king of Louisiana in true Huey Long tradition, has recently buried his wife and married her sister. His only child, grief-stricken by her mother’s death, is also unnerved by the speed of the remarriage and its suggestion of an inappropriate liaison predating widowerhood. Grayson’s mother dies ostensibly of a self-inflicted drug overdose on the downside of manic depression, but Grayson comes to believe that her mother has been murdered. Her first clue is not an appearance by the ghost of her mother, but a videotape the troubled woman made days before her death: “I heard their voices through the door. And I’m not talking about hearing voices, I’m talking about people who were plotting to kill me.”
Hamlet’s ghost is enigmatic—is he truly the dead father come back, or a manifestation of evil sent to drag Hamlet into first mortal sin and then hell?—but Grayson’s videotape exists in three undeniable dimensions; anyone could watch it and see the same tormented woman that Grayson sees. The enigma here is whether the animating presence on the videotape is speaking the truth, or whether her claims are merely the ravings of a diagnosed paranoiac. As for Grayson’s own growing sense of certainty about the truth of the videotape, it too may be illusory: Manic depression is a highly heritable illness that often first manifests itself during periods of high stress. And Grayson is, after all, in the middle of a gigantic stressfest, including not only her mother’s apparent suicide and her father’s remarriage, but also his soon-to-be-kicked-off bid for the U.S. presidency and her own impending wedding.
Anyone who knows Hamlet even remotely has to admire the ingenuity at work here. Every single parallel between Grayson’s story and Hamlet’s—and there are many more than the few listed here—is absolutely credible, and not just as modern fictional equivalents of the business of the Jacobean stage. What recommends this story beyond mere cleverness is that it operates so compellingly as a novel in its own right.
The setting alone is the perfect pressure cooker for a novel that turns on questions of murder and madness: Louisiana heat. Politics. Crooked coroners. Ambitious lieutenants. Undiscovered affairs. Confessionals. Mardi Gras. The pages are thick with atmosphere, a barometric heaviness that lies like doom over everything that happens.
Grayson is the perfect protagonist for both a Hitchcockian thriller and a Shakespearean tale of psychic torment. She loved her mother but also recognizes her mother’s exotic weaknesses. She worships her father but knows him for the ruthless man he is. She distrusts her fiancé but marries him anyway out of a greater fear of being alone. In every way, her own most potent impulses are in conflict with themselves, and, like Hamlet, Grayson is halved by indecision—perhaps most powerfully by her classic film noir compulsion to know the truth about her mother’s death and her equal but very post-therapy-age need to shut up and move on into something resembling normal life.
The plot is so taut you could bounce the skull of Yorick against it, and the suspense grows almost unbearably toward its climax in a hotel room in New Orleans as Mardi Gras revelers lurch and dance in the streets below. But this is not a page-turner in the traditional sense. Its language is too rich, its interior monologue so engrossing, that it’s a mistake to hurry past them to find out what’s actually going on—not whodunit, but whether anything was actually done at all. Like Shakespeare before her, Dewberry has written a tale in which the telling is as important as the story being told.
Elizabeth Dewberry, who attended Vanderbilt University, hasn’t published a book since 1994, back when she was still very young (not to mention still Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn). So it would be impossible to discover all the influences that led her to write a book this brilliant, a book that both fulfills her early promise and far surpasses it. One of those influences may well be Robert Olen Butler. Certainly, one of them was Shakespeare. And Dewberry has to be familiar with Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, the very feminist take on King Lear set in Iowa farm country. Still, while Dewberry has created a heroine who faithfully follows the trajectory of the most famous tragedy in all English literature, what Grayson does in her indecision is truer to Grayson than to Hamlet; knowing the play won’t give away the novel’s climax. And when a writer takes on Shakespeare, not in homage but in dialogue, it’s safe to say the book she comes up with is all her own.
