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    City of Truth
    City of Truth
    City of Truth
    Ebook148 pages2 hours

    City of Truth

    By James Morrow

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    This “delightful” Nebula Award–winning novella about a world without lies has “a sharp, unmerciful edge that would have pleased old Jonathan Swift” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
      Truth reigns supreme in the city-state of Veritas. Not even politicians lie, and weirdly frank notices abound—such as warning: this elevator maintained by people who hate their jobs: ride at your own risk. In this dystopia of mandatory candor, every preadolescent citizen is ruthlessly conditioned, through a Skinnerian ordeal called a “brainburn,” to speak truthfully under all circumstances.
    Jack Sperry wouldn’t dream of questioning the norms of Veritas; he’s happy with his life and his respectable job as a “deconstructionist,” destroying “mendacious” works of art—relics from a less honest era. But when his adored son, Toby, falls gravely ill, the truth becomes Jack’s greatest enemy. Somehow our hero must overcome his brainburn and attempt to heal his child with beautiful lies.
    Alternately hilarious and moving, City of Truth thoughtfully explores the pitfalls inherent in any attempt to engineer a perfect society.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781480438637
    City of Truth
    Author

    James Morrow

    Born in 1947, James Morrow has been writing fiction ever since he, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. This three-page, six-chapter fantasy is still in the author’s private archives. Upon reaching adulthood, Jim produced nine novels of speculative fiction, including the critically acclaimed Godhead Trilogy. He has won the World Fantasy Award (for Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah), the Nebula Award (for “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge” and the novella City of Truth), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima). A fulltime fiction writer, Jim makes his home in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, his son, an enigmatic sheepdog, and a loopy beagle. He is hard at work on a novel about Darwinism and its discontents.

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    Reviews for City of Truth

    4/5

    14 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A novella that packs a lot in its 160 pages. Enjoyable, humorous, smart, and heartbreaking, and that's the truth. 1992 Nebula Award winner
    • 5/5
      A story that is both satire and brulat at the same time.
    • 4/5
      An interesting (and unlikely) follow-up to "Being Mortal," this early science fiction novella by James Morrow tackles the issue of how truthful to be to someone who is dying (in this case, the main character's young son). Though it is rough around the edges and does not delve deeply into character (that's not the point), I thought Morrow did a pretty good job of balancing the humorous aspects of a "City of Truth" (Veritas, the vera-city) (where no one lies by order of law and psychological conditioning), the moral and emotional issues of honesty and fabrication, and the tragic circumstance of losing someone you love (yes, truly love).

      Another unexpected treat, considering I started this on December 25...Christmas makes an appearance in the story (the holiday with the clearest challenge to parental honesty), and Santa even makes an appearance.

      If you haven't read Morrow's Godhead trilogy, you have a treat in store.

      Now I find myself intrigued by another of his titles: The Continent of Lies.
    • 4/5
      Speculative fiction, I guess, but more concerned with literary experimentation than the scientific kind. Still, Morrow plays it admirably straight here, and the results are hilarious. I'd like a Plymouth Adequate of my own, in fact. You could, I suppose, criticize this book by saying that he mixes up the concepts of personal honesty and rationalist accuracy, and you'd be right: has any scientist ever argued that you should offer your honest opinion about everyone and everything you see? Still, "City of Truth" also succeeds in demonstrating exactly how much of real life is made up of tactful silences, white lies, and euphemism and how necessary these things are to our psychological survival. It's also, as others have mentioned, terribly sad at the end, but Morrow essentially forces his readers to consider the potential virtues of the cheerless dystopia he constructed in the book's first half. A very neat trick indeed.
    • 5/5
      According to Kant, human beings occupy a special place in creation, and morality can be summed up in one ultimate commandment of reason, or imperative, from which all duties and obligations derive. Known as the categorical imperative, it denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that asserts its authority in all circumstances, both required and justified as an end in itself. It is best known in its first formulation: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. Based on this Kant asserted that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance.Imagine a city, let us call it Veritas, where all human adults are conditioned so that they cannot tell a lie. This is the premise of James Morrow's novel City of Truth, otherwise known as Veritas. In it he explores the implications of this for Veritas society. Some of the results are very funny, as any kind of dishonesty or unsubstantiated claims are impossible. So you have cars with such names as the "Ford Sufficient" and "Plymouth Adequate", a restaurant offering "Murdered Cow Sandwich with Wilted Hearts Lettuce and High-Cholesterol Fries", a morning TV programme called "Enduring Another Day", a "Camp Ditch-The-Kids" summer camp, the "Centre for Palliative Treatment of Hopeless Diseases" and (my favourite) an illuminated sign on the cathedral: "Assuming God Exists, Jesus May Have Been His Son". The effect on interpersonal relationships is indicated by the vow at a traditional wedding ceremony: "To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to the degree that these mischievous and sentimental abstractions possess any meaning." All those little "white lies" and "lies by omission" which lubricate relationships in our world are impossible, so a degree of frankness which we would consider brutally rude is the norm. The protagonist of this novella, Jack Sperry, leads a simple straightforward life as a "deconstructionist", one who destroys works of art (all basically lies) for his living. His daily life in Veritas is one which is based only on the truth: "There are no metaphors in Veritas"(p 5). He takes his adequate car to his job "at the Wittgenstein Museum in Plato Borough, giving illusion its due."(p 2) When his son Toby, who is away for the summer at "Camp Ditch-the-Kids", is bit by a Rabbit and contracts a fatal disease Jack's life is turned upside-down in more ways than one. His story is a more a fable, a satirical view of the unintended consequences of being unable to lie and the way that humans who can lie deal with the accidents of living. Filled with humorous notions, phrases, and moments that create mental double-takes for the reader this novella is a delight in both its lightness and heaviness (apologies to Milan Kundera). There are lies that we tell ourselves to help us deal with the world, but this story imagines a city where you cannot do that. It is unpleasant and humorous at the same time, but, like a philosophic thought experiment, sometimes it is the best way to illustrate a complicated philosophical concept in the context of a story or situation. James Morrow has a reputation of presenting big ideas in clever ways (for an example read his Towing Jehovah). Morrow's style has been likened to Vonnegut's, but this wry little story reminded me of Swift. City of Truth is clever in ways that will leave you thinking about the meaning of life and the nature of truth for a long time after you finish reading the book.
    • 4/5
      City of Truth is a novella set in Veritas, a city where everyone is completely candid all the time and lying is a taboo that causes them physical pain. But when Jack Sperry's son Toby gets diagnosed with a rare illness, he pins all of his hopes on the idea that if they deceive Toby into thinking he's not sick, he won't succumb to the disease.The book half-worked for me. Veritas is clearly written as a satire, but I couldn't connect it to anything "real" (no real-world groups lobbying for unflinching honesty all the time) so the cleverness of that fell flat. I would have actually liked more exposition on the situation; characters allude to a past "Age of Lies" where advertising was deceptive and people could lie with impugnity, and maybe more explanation would have helped me understand Morrow's point to all of this.However, beneath the construction of this world is a small story about a father coping with the illness and imminent loss of his son. Jack is a desperate father, who gives up his most cherished values and almost his whole life, that his son may not suffer in his illness. So the most meaningful lies in the book are the harmless ones which help us grieve and find solace in dark hours, when people can't quite face a difficult situation fully.
    • 5/5
      I love James Morrow's work, and while this book is probably my least favorite so far, it was still excellent. Alternately heart-wrenching and hilarious.
    • 4/5
      1992 Nebula Award. Funny in the beginning, Sad at the end. Cool how he makes you think that this cold Utopia is such a terrible thing but then you realize that lying, even to make someone feel better, is bad too.

    Book preview

    City of Truth - James Morrow

    One

    I NO LONGER LIVE in the City of Truth. I have exiled myself from Veritas, from all cities—from the world. The room in which I’m writing is cramped as a county jail and moist as the inside of a lung, but I’m learning to call it home. My only light is a candle, a fat, butter-colored stalk from which nets of melted wax hang like cobwebs. I wonder what it would be like to live in that candle—in the translucent crannies that surround the flame: a fine abode, warm, safe, and snug. I imagine myself spending each day wandering waxen passageways and sitting in paraffin parlors, each night lying in bed listening to the steady drip-drip-drip of my home consuming itself.

    My name is Jack Sperry, and I am thirty-eight years old. I was born in truth’s own city, Veritas, on the last day of its bicentennial year. Like many boys of my generation, I dreamed of becoming an art critic one day: the pure primal thrill of attacking a painting, the sheer visceral kick of savaging a movie or a poem. In my case, however, the dream turned into reality, for by my twenty-second year I was employed as a deconstructionist down at the Wittgenstein Museum in Plato Borough, giving illusion its due.

    Other dreams—wife, children, happy home—came harder. From the very first Helen and I wrestled with the thorny Veritasian question of whether love was a truthful term for how we felt about each other—such a misused notion, love, a kind of one-word lie—a problem we began ignoring once a more concrete crisis had taken its place.

    His sperm are lazy, she thought. Her eggs are duds, I decided. But at last we found the right doctor, the proper pill, and suddenly there was Toby, flourishing inside Helen’s redeemed womb: Toby the embryo; Toby the baby; Toby the toddler; Toby the preschool carpenter, forever churning out crooked birdhouses, lopsided napkin holders, and asymmetrical bookends; Toby the boy naturalist, befriending every slithery, slimy, misbegotten creature ever to wriggle across the face of the Earth. This was a child with a maggot farm. A roach ranch. A pet slug. I think I love him, I told Helen one day. Let’s not get carried away, she replied.

    The morning I met Martina Coventry, Toby was off at Camp Ditch-the-Kids in the untamed outskirts of Kant Borough. He sent us a picture postcard every day, a routine that, I realize in retrospect, was a kind of smuggling operation; once Toby got home, the postcards would all be there, waiting to join his vast collection.

    To wit:

    Dear Mom and Dad: Today we learned how to survive in case we’re ever lost in the woods—what kind of bark to eat and stuff. Counselor Rick says he never heard of anybody actually using these skills. Your son, Toby.

    And also:

    Dear Mom and Dad: There’s a big rat trap in the pantry here, and guess who always sneaks in at night and finds out what animal got caught and then sets it free? Me! Counselor Rick says we’re boring. Your son, Toby.

    It was early, barely 7 A.M., but already Booze Before Breakfast was jammed to its crumbling brick walls. I made my way through a conglomeration of cigarette smoke and beer fumes, through frank sweat and honest halitosis. A jukebox thumped out Probity singing Copingly Ever After. The saloon keeper, Jimmy Breeze, brought me the usual—a raspberry Danish and a Bloody Mary—setting them on the splintery cedar bar. I told him I had no cash but would pay him tomorrow. This was Veritas. I would.

    I spotted only one free chair—at a tiny, circular table across from a young woman whose wide face and plump contours boasted, to this beholder’s eye, the premier sensuality of a Rubens model. Peter Paul Rubens was much on my mind just then, for I’d recently criticized not only The Garden of Love but also The Raising of the Cross.

    Come here often? she asked as I approached, my plastic-wrapped Danish poised precariously atop my drink. Her abundant terra-cotta hair was compacted into a modest bun. Her ankle-length green dress was made of guileless cambric.

    I sat down. Uh-huh, I mumbled, pushing aside the sugar bowl, the napkin dispenser, and the woman’s orange peels to make room for my Bloody and Danish. I always stop in on my way to the Wittgenstein.

    You a critic? Even in the endemic gloom of Booze Before Breakfast, her smooth, unpainted skin glowed.

    I nodded. Jack Sperry.

    Can’t say I’m impressed. It doesn’t take much intellectual prowess, does it?

    She could be as honest as she liked, provided I could watch her voluptuous lips move. "What line are you in?" I asked.

    I’m a writer. Her eyes expanded: limpid, generous eyes, the cobalt blue of Salome’s So-So Contraceptive Cream. It has its dangers, of course. There’s always that risk of falling into … what’s it called?

    Metaphor?

    Metaphor.

    There were no metaphors in Veritas. Metaphors were lies. Flesh could be like grass, but it never was grass. Use a metaphor in Veritas, and your conditioning instantly possessed you, hammering your skull, searing your heart, dropping you straight to hell in a bucket of pain. So to speak.

    What do you write? I asked.

    Doggerel. Greeting-card messages, advertising jingles, inspirational verses like you see in—

    Sell much?

    A grimace distorted her luminous face. "I should say I’m an aspiring writer."

    I’d like to read some of your doggerel, I asserted. And I’d like to have sex with you, I added, wincing at my candor. It wasn’t easy being a citizen.

    Her grimace intensified.

    Sorry if I’m being offensive, I said. Am I being offensive?

    You’re being offensive.

    Offensive only in the abstract, or offensive to you personally?

    Both. She slid a wedge of orange into her wondrous mouth. Are you married?

    Yes.

    A good marriage?

    Pretty good. To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to the degree that these mischievous and sentimental abstractions possess any meaning: Helen and I had opted for a traditional ceremony. "Our son is terrific. I think I love

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