About “Liars” by Nathaniel Bellows

Why review a short story? The worst that could possibly happen is you waste half an hour of your day, right? You’re not looking at anything like the three week investment you usually plan for a novel. You don’t need to listen to someone tell you why it’s worth reading (or not). You might as well find out on your own.

            There’s some truth to that, so I would like you to stop, right now, thinking about these posts as reviews. Let’s just try to figure out what makes a good short story. Let’s do that together.

So go ahead and take a look at “Liars” by Nathaniel Bellows.

Now.

This is a story about the judges and commentators and critics who should know what they are talking about but don’t, and it is a story about some of the nobodies who are never heard but ought to be because they know exactly what they are talking about. There is drama and conflict from the beginning that feels quiet and suppressed even, but was more than enough to keep me reading curiously right to the very end. I finished the story feeling thoughtful and content. So that’s all good.

I would like to move on to some criticism here, but this is a hard story to criticize. If, say, we were to imagine every short story as a person physically explaining something to you or giving you a message or something, then I just spent half an hour listening to a women whisper to me calmly, “everything everyone writes is legitimate. Every writer of every caliber is exposing themself at least a little bit, and no one really has the right to crush them so utterly with rejection even though they obviously can’t all be published.”

            I’m having a hard time finding the will to tell her, “That’s well and good, and I’ve certainly been listening to you intently, but your dialogue felt forced some of the time.”

            No. I agree with her. I do. There is truth in everything that has ever been written, and if you can’t see it, then you just aren’t looking hard enough. So I am not going to try to tell you where I felt this story failed. I am going to tell that Andy’s little speech in the office left me thinking about how forced it sounded instead of what Nan might have been thinking while he spoke or whether Tammy could hear him and what she was thinking.

            I am going to tell you that that is the only criticism that feels fair. There were only a couple short moments while I was reading this when I thought about the story itself and the writer and what the write might have intended instead of thinking about Nan and Nan’s brother and Andy and Tammy. The other moments easily outweighed those moments though, so this one definitely gets some thumbs up. Read it if you haven’t yet.