Alice Adams: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Alice Adams is a love song to the little lie, the fib, and the misrepresentation. While there are larger lies in the book—Virgil Adams’ betrayal of his employer, Walter’s double life—Tarkington describes frequently, almost lovingly, Alice’s dissembling. She is a consummate liar, passing her continuous embellishments and playacting off as a survival mechanism. In just one of her flirtatious conversations with Russell, we get these descriptions of her lying:
Veracity is usually simple, and its opposite, to be successful, should be as simple, but practitioners of the opposite are most often impulsive like Alice and, like her, they become enmeshed in elaborations.
The sketching was spontaneous and dramatic. Mathematics had no part in it…
Thus Alice built her walls of flimsy, working always gaily, or with at least the air of gaiety; and even as she rattled on, there was somewhere in her mind a constant little wonder Everything she said seemed to be necessary to support something else she had said. How had it happened?
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book before that so closely examined the process of the liar, the gestures and small comments made to misdirect and influence the behavior of others, the conversational posturing and backpedaling. The dinner party that is Alice’s downfall is the great confluence of her lies and her reality. Sullen servants are hired, the threadbare house is rearranged so the shabbiness is barely concealed, the fancy menu planned which ends up being completely unsuitable for the weather. Unfortunately Alice’s verbal alacrity can’t mask her drab reality, but it takes that visceral a collision to completely undo her delicate net of lies. Oddly, I never get the sense that Tarkington is punishing Alice for her dishonesty in particular. He seems more uncomfortable with her class ambition, almost as if he expects this kind of lying from a young woman on the prowl for a suitable husband.
