The Lie

The Lie

Appalling, Yet Intriguing

By: Brianna Hopkins

 

Source: www.amazon.com

Source: www.dallastexasrealstateblog.com

The novel, The Lie, written by Chad Kultgen, is a very interesting story to say the least. Taking place in Dallas, Texas on the Southern Methodist University campus, Kultgen was very blunt to say the least when he described the materialistic and selfish qualities the people of Highland Park and students of this university withheld. 

Kultgen wrote the book with three different narrators, which I found fascinating. It gave me a chance to see three different sides of the social scene at SMU. One side came from a snobby sorority girl who wanted to be engaged to a man with a wealthy family before she even received her degree. The other side was from a young man who got into SMU, not because of how much money his parents had, but because of how smart and driven he was. Finally, the third side was told by the son of the richest man in the Dallas area whom everyone knew about. All three sides gave the audience and me a chance to get the real insight to what was going on within the university’s social scene. 

This novel is filled with a lot of inappropriate humor, which quite frankly, sometimes left me speechless and even sometimes appalled.  Kultgen is a very direct author who is most widely known for his controversial novel, The Average American Male. Even though for many, Kultgen’s books can be very offensive and include humor that may be misleading or hard to understand, but The Lie left me questioning my own values of myself as a woman, and what I can do to personally prevent myself from falling into the category of only wanting certain men for their money. This novel taught me many things that I would have never known before reading.