Gorgeous Lies

Returning to the Furey-Cooper family Martha McPhee introduced in Bright Angel Time, Gorgeous Lies opens two decades later. Charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying, and the tribe he heads--his five children, his wife's three girls, and their uniting child, Alice--has returned to Chardin, the farm where they grew up and Anton played out his visions of communal living. Chronicled by film crews and reporters, they had been famous for being the new American blended family. But as Anton grows weaker, the hurts, allegiances, and betrayals of those years boil to the surface, and the children find themselves reliving the knotty intimacy they share as they struggle to make their peace with Anton and Anton struggles to make peace with himself.
McPhee has already established herself as an acclaimed new talent; now she fulfills her promise. With shimmering prose and an acutely observant eye, she has created a portrait of an era and a family that explores the limits, and obligations, of love.

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In a sprawling house on a hill, floating in a sea of green fields, charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying. The tribe he heads - his five children, his wife's three girls, and their uniting child Alice - has gathered in a vigil at Chardin, the farm where they grew up and Anton played out his visions of communal living. In the 1970s they had been famous for being the new American blended family, their utopian lifestyle chronicled by film crews and reporters. But as Anton grows weaker, the hurts, allegiances, and betrayals of those years boil to the surface; and the children find themselves forced to confront the knotty intimacies of the past along with the misunderstandings of the present as they struggle to make their peace with Anton - and Anton struggles to make peace with himself.

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In a sequel taking place twenty years after the events in Bright Angel Time, the family of dying therapist Anton Furey finds its precarious balance upset by their efforts to make peace with Anton and each other. 30,000 first printing.

CHAPTER ONE
Promise
THEY LOVED ANTON. Every single one of them. Alice most of all. She was his youngest. Eve loved him. She was his wife. Agnes loved him. She was his ex-wife. Lily loved him. She was his lover. They all loved him. The little beady-eyed preacher woman, the woman who sold ducks, Eve's divorce lawyer who always had a different girl on his arm, the Strange couple from down the road. (That was their name, Strange, and they were strange, with dramatic drawn-out English accents, though they were not English-he a poet and a banker, she an aging actress.) The Furey kids loved him, of course. He was their father. The Cooper girls tried to hate him, but what they really wanted was for him to love them. Love them big and wide and infinitely, like a father. The Cooper girls were not his children.

Once, they had all lived at Chardin-all the children, that is. Long ago in the 1970s. It was called Chardin for the Omega Point, and it was Anton's dream that he could create a home that was a perfect meeting place of the human and the divine: a divine milieu, the setting for a profound and mystical vision of God. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was his preferred philosopher. He upset the Catholic Church, scaring its thinkers into thinking about his attempt to combine evolutionary theory and Christian theology in a seamless whole.

Chardin sprawled on a hill, the highest point in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, blessed with hundred-mile views and lapped by seas of green fields rolling into cornfields and forests with creeks slinking through them. And up there, there was a lot of sky with all its storms and sunshine. In the spring forsythia, magnolia, lilac, and dogwood bloomed. The house had been a hunter's cabin, added on to over the years by Anton and the architect so that wings extended from it, spokelike, sprouting glass rooms and lofts and decks. At one end of the house an indoor swimming pool steamed like the mouth of a dragon, so fiercely you could not see but an inch in front of you. Steam seeped through the cracks in the sliding doors so that that end of the house seemed alive. Anton, who was many things-a philosopher writing a treatise on love, a berry salesman, a dealer in Haitian art, a writer, a Gestalt therapist, a Texan-had wanted the indoor pool as a place to hold therapy sessions.

The architect loved him. They had big dreams for what more they would do to Chardin. Dreams involving silos, Moorish courtyards, a barn, a tower on the barn, an office from which Anton could watch the setting sun. On the roof of this office he would gather all his children and friends to read poetry in the dimming light.

"I need a small pool. Big enough to fit twenty-five people or so and it needs to get pretty hot," Anton said to the architect upon first meeting him. Standing in the architect's living room, he also asked for a whiskey though it wasn't noon. Outside, Anton's turquoise Cadillac languished in the sun, filled with kids. "Scotch," the architect said, because he only had scotch. Slim and handsome, with a quiet voice and a tendency to stroke his bearded chin, he was a precise man with a tidy mind and a tidy house, and in his world people did not drink before six. On Anton's ring finger the architect noticed an enormous turquoise ring. In his world, as well, men did not wear rings. His name was Laurence-pronounced the French way. Anton drank down the scotch and then ushered Laurence into the back of the Cadillac while all the kids crammed up front. Schoolbooks and boys' underwear were everywhere, and as Anton drove fast Laurence flopped this way, then that, picking the underwear off of him. "A pool," Anton said, looking at Laurence in the rearview mirror, "for my therapy sessions. I believe in finding ways to become un-self-conscious." And Laurence nodded and the kids carried on up front. Anton had one hand on the wheel, the other draped over the back of the seat. He piloted the car like a master, suave Texan that he was. The idea of un-self-consciousness floated like a party balloon in the back. Laurence hoped he'd get to this house alive. And he worried. He was a worrier. You could read it on his tightened face. "I don't know," Laurence kept saying, distressed because an indoor pool was never as easy as it seemed, because his beautiful wife was having an affair, because he had four teenage boys and a floundering practice in a tidy little town. "It'll be fine," Anton said into the rearview mirror-smooth Texas accent. And just the way he said it, just the way Anton held him with his eyes, made Laurence feel possibility. As if Anton's eyes opened up for him and allowed him a visit inside, the mix of enthusiasm and wickedness and faith therein beckoning Laurence, seducing Laurence-as if Anton's dreams, sliding off his lips like truth, were large enough to save him, too.

They became fast friends with their elaborate visions for Chardin. Before too long Anton was inviting Laurence to rebirthing ceremonies on the front lawn in which a person ready for rebirth crawled naked through a canal of arching bodies, teaching Laurence one more aspect of un-self-consciousness.

The steam from the pool caused the ivy to thrive. Ivy crept up the walls, nearly covering the house. It crept through some of the windows into some of the rooms, and though it looked beautiful, over the years it caused the walls to rot, the roof to leak, the pipes to crack. Its roots snaked underground and around the sewage pipes, cracking them, too, and on thick July days the faint smell of waste wafted over the yard.

"It'll be all right," Anton promised. He promised that many times over the years-when the waste backed up into the basement bathroom and overflowed onto the basement floor; when water dripped through the ceiling from the roof onto Julia's pink bedspread; when, indeed, the design for an indoor pool proved more difficult than originally thought and the wall between the pool and Jane's room turned to paste and crumbled. "It'll be all right," he promised when they couldn't afford the taxes and the IRS threatened to foreclose on the house, when cops flew low over the cornfields in helicopters to determine if grass was growing there. Grass as in pot, dope, weed, reefer, marijuana. Anton and the kids grew it back then, in the 1970s, and the cops would fly in low to inspect the fields and Anton would shout to all the kids, "The cops are coming!" His beautiful, wicked grin lit up each one of them. They'd scramble out of the house, slithering into the fields to lay waste to the plants. "The cops are coming," exhilaration in his voice and a thrill running through the kids because they knew that they would not get caught. "It's just ditch weed anyway," one kid would say. The cops would come, would circle, that's true. The loud hum of the helicopters teasing the kids as they lay in the fields against the prickly husks and the corn silk. The wind from the helicopters blew over their backs.

"It'll be all right," Anton promised with all the authority of a Texas Ranger-his sideburns curling, his blue eyes squinting, his Texas accent full. He was six generations Texas on his mama's side. The first oil well in Texas blew at Spindletop on January 10, 1901, not far from the site of his great-great-granddaddy Beaumont's farm. Beaumont had been a French trapper, trapped alligators in the bayous and swamps. In 1824 he sold his land to other trappers and farmers and they made the town of Beaumont to honor him, and the town thrived, growing rich on rice and salt and soy and even blueberries and later crawfish from the Neches River before it became an oil mecca. "If only Beaumont hadn't sold the land," Anton would tell the kids, as if great wealth and fortune were just within their grasp. His great-granddaddy was a journalist for the Corsicana Star and one of the few men in Texas who was pro-Union during the Civil War. One hundred and twe

Martha McPhee is a Bowdoin graduate and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Redbook, Open City, Harper's Bazaar, and other journals. She is the author of Bright Angel Time, a New York Times Notable Book, and coauthor with Jenny and Laura McPhee of Girls. She lives in New York City.

McPhee returns here to the characters and themes of her much-praised first novel, Bright Angel Time. In 20 years, many things have changed in the lives of the large Furey-Cooper clan. Once the members were widely known as exemplars of a new kind of blended family, living out the utopian visions of patriarch Anton. Now Anton lies virtually helpless, dying slowly with many dreams unrealized and his magnum opus on human sexuality unwritten. The siblings gather at the family farm, linked painfully not only by grief but also by longtime resentments, disappointments, and misunderstandings that fester as Anton's end approaches. Most heavily burdened is youngest daughter Alice, the biological and symbolic link between the Fureys and Coopers, who is obsessed with somehow ending her father's suffering. More somber than the earlier book, but its equal in subtlety and clever writing, this novel chronicles the fate of Sixties and Seventies ideals colliding with the harsher realities of the Nineties. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/02.] Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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An offbeat writing style and poetic metaphors distinguish this crowded tale of a patriarch, his harem of lovers and the litters of offspring they produce, the follow-up to McPhee's well-received novel Bright Angel Time. Gestalt therapist Anton Furey is dying of pancreatic cancer, and the people closest to him gather at the New Jersey family estate, Chardin, and recall the emotional ups and downs of life with a womanizing dreamer and charismatic charmer. His children with ex-wife Agnes insecure Nicholas, gentle Caroline, money-hungry Sofia, barely there Timothy and adopted Finny (son of Anton and an Italian maid) are not fully sketched: some are given vivid cameos, while others fade into the background. The children of Anton's wife Eve from a previous marriage cynical, headstrong Jane, model-perfect Julia and homely Kate are better drawn and as flighty in their loyalty to their stepfather as he is in his choice of lovers. Youngest daughter Alice, the only child of Anton and Eve, is Anton's favorite for her mix of joie de vivre and sweet gravity. Like an anti-Brady Bunch, the members of the sprawling double family fluctuate in their alliances and affections over the 25 years of Eve and Anton's marriage. Their one common trait is their hunger for Anton's attention and approval. As the novel unfolds, Anton's unlikely past is revealed: his Texas childhood, his early stint in a Jesuit seminary and his grand passion for the communal haven of Chardin. His insatiable need for connection particularly with women can be repellant (as when he pursues one of his stepdaughters), but it is his infectious zest for life that drives this invigorating if convoluted novel. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.