No One's Telling The Truth In Joshua Ferris's New Novel — Or Are They?
Charlie Barnes, the figure at the center of Ferris's A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is 68 and on his fifth marriage, and after a self-diagnised cancer scare, he wants his son to write his life story.
Every family is a group of unreliable narrators. That's not to say that your parents lied when they told you, say, how they met, but time has a way of distorting memories, and fiction replaces fact in our minds seamlessly and subconsciously. Or as the narrator of Joshua Ferris' dazzling new novel puts it: "Every story we tell ourselves is some version of make-believe."
There's no shortage of make-believe in , Ferris' fifth, and best, book. The titular
