I looked for this book because of my huge enjoyment of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, co-authored by Annie Barrows, and her aunt, Marry Anne Shaffer. I just knew Barrows would be a good storyteller, and I was not disappointed.
The Truth According to Us is set in 1930s Macedonia, a small, self-absorbed town in West Virginia, with very little claim to fame or even much enterprise, except one Mill, a factory really, manufacturing socks. Our protagonists are the Romeyn family and one Layla Beck, daughter of a senator who has been cast out temporarily to seek her own living, and so has been granted a job by a friend of her father’s, writing the book of the history of Macedonia for their sesquicentennial celebrations. The beautiful, elegant, urbane Layla – who turns out to be not just a social butterfly, but quite a intelligent woman and a good writer! – boards with the Romeyns. The household is headed by Jottie, unmarried in her 30s, who looks after her brother Felix’s children, Willa and Bird. The house is also home to the Romeyn twins, Mae and Minerva, Jottie’s siblings, who are happily married but prefer to stay at home on weekdays, because they cannot bear to live apart from each other for too long. The story is told from several characters’ perspectives, Willa’s, Jottie’s, and also Layla’s.
The period and place are key to the story, and beautifully depicted by Barrows, who evokes the period so well with its particular formalities, norms, expectations, and moral standards. It is set in the time of the Depression and in the background there is a little about loss of jobs, the impending strike in Macedonia, and such socio-economic influences, but it is very much background material; foregrounded are the personal stories. Macedonia’s history, Willa tells us, is eked out by the teachers as best they can in the sesquicentennial celebrations, but there were few major events.
If it hadn’t been for the War Between the States, I don’t know what they would have done. When Virginia seceded from the Union, western Virginia got mad and seceded right back into it, all except four little counties, one of them ours, that stuck out their tongues at West Virginia and declared themselves part of the Confederacy, a piece of sass with long consequences in the way of road-paving and school desks.
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This is as good an example as any of Barrow’s charming writing style, which manages to painlessly include a large amount of information, while also viewing the particular into the general, and giving the entire thing her own quirky spin. It is a style of writing that is eminently readable; light, amusing, flowing, fluent.
Layla goes about the town interviewing its prominent citizens, and the history unfolds for her the outsider as much as for us, which works out very nicely indeed, as a way of introducing the reader into this little town. The history turns out to be not so much of just the town, or even of the Depression, but more on the town’s secrets and skeletons, which the Romeyn family seem central to. Stories are rehashed, new relationships develop, old relationships are revived and revisited, and the occasional seeing through the eyes of 11-year old Willa is particularly useful as a writing device so the author can give us partial information, to make us puzzle over why things are the way they are, just as a child would wonder, with a child’s piecemeal knowledge. It works very well in building the structure and layers of the tale.
This is not a book where one marvels at the writing style for its startling brilliance; this is more the kind of read which is entirely comfortable, easy, soothing. One is in the hands of a born storyteller, who will tell you in plain language a most interesting and lively tale, painting very lovable characters, charitable even to the less likeable characters, and nothing really terrible is going to happen, because of one’s trust in the narrator. One never gets super-close to the characters because it is always through the person of the narrator/storyteller, so it is almost an old-fashioned kind of novel writing, but extremely comfortable. The almost 600 pages of this novel fly by swiftly; it is an undemanding read, but very very pleasant indeed. Well worth the time. I will be looking forward to other Barrows novels. (She has written quite a few other children’s books, but to date, The Truth According to Us and The Guernsey Society seem her only two adult novels.)
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