Liars v. The Book of George
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 17 • OPENING ROUND
Liars
v. The Book of George
Judged by Max Read
Max Read is a journalist, screenwriter, editor, and the owner-operator of Read Max, a weekly newsletter guide to the future. His work concerns the weird ways the internet makes us think, feel, and organize ourselves. His writing has appeared in various publications with the words “New York” in the title, including New York magazine, the New York Times, and the New York Times Magazine. He's also the former editor of multiple defunct websites, including Gawker and Select All. He lives in Brooklyn with his family. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “Vinson Cunningham is a good friend. I spotlighted/recommended Tony Tulathimutte's book in my newsletter. And I've had dinner with Ben Shattuck a couple times.” / maxread.substack.com
It would be difficult under any circumstance to have to choose one book over another, but it feels particularly tragic in this case, where the books go well together as a pair. Sarah Manguo’s Liars and Kate Greathead’s The Book of George are both, at their core, novels about bad relationships between cruelly feckless men and tragically compliant women, which at least makes them easy to compare. But they approach their shared subject from such different angles—first person versus third person, hot fury versus cool distance, Gen X indignation versus Millennial torpor—that picking between them feels less like a matter of assessing “quality,” whatever that would mean, and more a matter of taking sides on what a novel is for in the first place. Do you read books to pass the time pleasurably, or to stretch your consciousness and empathy as a reader? Are you seeking the specific (naturalistic social textures, ethnographic detail) or the universal (eternal human truths)? Do you want to like your books, or fear them?
This is not really what I signed up for, and I'm not really sure I reached the right conclusion. But I appreciated the way reading these books side by side made me consider more fundamental questions than mere preference. I made my choice—took a side on what novels should be for—but on a different day, seeking something different, I could easily have gone the other way.
Before I get into that, a word about each book. The Book of George concerns, yes, George, an entitled, directionless millennial man whom we follow, in sporadic updates, from the ages of 12 to “almost 40,” as he attends and graduates from college, moves to Brooklyn, writes a novel, and continuously disappoints and mistreats his family and his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Jenny. It is a Failson-Bildungsroman; less the story of a man’s development than his lack and disinterest thereof. The women in his life try to cajole and prod and jolt him into some kind of personal growth; they diagnose his maladjustment with increasing sharpness, but George chooses at every turn to wallow in his own learned helplessness. “You don’t see the point in applying yourself to activities that you don’t take pride in being good at it. Folding laundry, cleaning, cooking, taking out the trash and recycling… you think I like doing these things? You think I take pride in them?” Jenny asks him one night when he forgets to defrost the lasagna and does the dishes badly.’George's only response is to storm out. “What was the point of doing the dishes only to be reprimanded?” he asks himself.
The Book of George is in some sense a familiar work of literary fiction, and not only because, as the jacket copy suggests, its main character bears a slight resemblance to the infamous Nathaniel P.—in affect if not in literary success. It is finely crafted, warmly funny, keenly observed, and always careful to be an enjoyable read. George is not a particularly likable character, but the book is fair to him, reproducing his (admittedly stunted) motivations and thought processes with a limited third-person that gives us intimate access to George’s inner monologue while still holding him up for our observation at a distance. More importantly, the book is winning enough itself, in its dry humor and close eye for realistic detail, that it can survive being “the book of” a guy who is essentially a whiny drip.
Liars, by contrast, is often quite unpleasant—a distinctly personal, rarely funny, and defiantly unfair book. But it has a kind of magnetic power whose satisfactions are no less than Book of George’s, even if they're quite different. This a diaristic, aphoristic, first-person account of the long, slow dissolution of a nuclear-level toxic marriage. Jane, the narrator, is a writer. Her husband John is an unsuccessful artist turned seemingly extremely successful, if unpredictably employed, entrepreneur and executive. They move constantly for his jobs; he drinks too much; she has health problems; they fight. She tells a new neighbor that “we’d moved five times in six years and that John had gotten fired three times.” The neighbor, a pill-popper with anger issues—and, thanks to the question he's about to pose, the book’s voice of reason—asks, “Why are you still with him?” Eventually—and this is a spoiler only if it’s a spoiler to point at a car skidding across a six-lane highway and describe the trajectory of the wreck it’s about to endure—John asks for a divorce, and Jane learns that he’s leaving her for a family friend, who is herself married, with two kids.
Liars can be understood as Jane’s first, furious attempt at an answer to the neighbor’s question. Unlike Book of George, it’s not particularly concerned with providing a well-crafted narrative or intermittently humorous read. The story is harrowing and discomfiting, a genuinely arresting account of a woman almost completely undone by instability, cruelty, and her own inability to walk away. At its best, Jane’s narration has the controlled unreliability of a good psychological horror novel—repetitive, disjointed, intermittently lucid. At its worst, the tone is obsessively litigious and boringly polemical, closely documenting the body language of John and Jane’s mediator and spouting sub-Fleabag aphorisms about sex, romance, pain, and civilization. But even when you feel compelled to roll your eyes, the book is memorable and unwieldy; books that make you annoyed and frustrated have their virtues, too.
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When I told people I’d been reading two novels about bad relationships, they’d ask which one was better, which always made me pause. Better at what? Better for what? (They’d sometimes also ask me to detail the precise nature of the bad relationships in each book, pursuing imaginary gossip about fictional characters, which is the kind of literary criticism I most enjoy.) It’s not that one or the other is “better” or “worse” so much as each offers an entirely different set of pleasures. This is what I mean when I say the choice is as much about what novels are for. E.g.:
If the point of novels is to provide a few hours of pleasurable entertainment: Book of George, definitely. It’s funny!
If the point of novels is to give insight to other subjectivities: Liars, which, for better or for worse, gives you driver’s-seat access to Jane’s brain.
If the point of novels is to record the detailed textures of specific worlds: The Book of George is about as accurate a portrait of 21st-century college-educated millennial brownstone Brooklyn—a subject in which I am, by accident of fate, an expert—as I have ever read. (About two thirds of the way through the book, I thought maybe I’d caught Greathead slipping, and noted to myself the implausible lack of crypto guys in George’s social orbit. Not half a page after the moment I had that thought, George’s college friend Benji appeared, in a Tesla, suggesting that George invest “in something called cryptocurrencies.”)
If the point of novels is is to limn universal truths of human nature: Liars, with the caveat that one person’s universal truth (about marriage, motherhood, sex, and/or the patriarchy) is another’s subjective opinion.
The fact is, I think the novel as a form is for all of these things! But in the time after reading these two books, as I have thought about it and sat with it, I find myself increasingly coming around to the opinion that there is a purpose for the novel that undergirds and overrules all others. The point of novels, I have come to believe, the essential objective that they must fulfill above all others, is to give us something to text our friends about. And by this metric, according to this vision, there was a clear winner. I enjoyed Book of George; I felt with its characters; I admired the skill and care that went into its creation. But after I put it down I didn’t talk about it much. Liars, on the other hand, I often found maddening—but I was texting friends questions, complaints, and quotations the whole time I read it. It demanded to be interrogated and dissected, it begged to be judged and gossiped about. And whatever other complaints I have, that suggests a power that needs to be reckoned with. Or, at least, texted about.
Advancing:
Liars
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: Marriage is an artifact of the patriarchy but it can also be a metaphor for the patriarchy. Like many characters in a metaphor, Liars’ John might seem something like a caricature, but I suspect that almost of all of his actions, taken individually, will seem familiar to many women: His selfish disregard for Jane’s career; his performative parenting; his expectation that Jane will submit to his whims and needs.
Every reader, and even other characters in the book, recognizes that Jane should leave him. She cannot. Her reasons may not always be logically compelling, but they are easily grasped. Her understanding of marriage comes from a sample of one. She is convinced that this is what marriage is like and that her friends’ marriages—based on their own complaints—must be even worse than hers.
John, you and I have been married to our (I’ll add, very successful) wives for more than 50 years combined, and I no doubt take my happy marriage (and my role within it) for granted. Judge Read compares Liars to a horror story (as you did in a text to me when you were reading it), and it elicits an almost constant Get out of the house! sensation in the reader. It also invited a lot of welcome reflection on what my own marriage has been and will be, and what marriage as an institution has wrought and will mean.
John Warner: Get out of the house, indeed! Once I started Liars, I almost did not stop reading—partly because of the “diaristic” “aphoristic” style—but also because we have a first-person narrator in distress from the first word on, with our readerly spider sense growing increasingly alert that some major shoe is going to drop, while pretty much knowing what it is.
A gripping, uncomfortable read, not the least because the horrible husband and I share the same name and I got a little shock each time it appeared in print. As you note, this year will be my 25th wedding anniversary with eight years of coupledom prior to that. My wife and I have been joined in some fashion since I was 22 years old. I’m confident that I am not the John of Liars—in fact, we’ve moved house several times to follow my wife’s career because my work is more portable—but also, I am not entirely not not John.
The John of Liars is something of a malevolent force instantiated by the patriarchy. I don’t think I’m a malevolent force, but I cannot run from the patriarchy. I have a very soft spot for The Book of George because I think it is both funny and warm, but also spiky and even angry, but I cannot deny the potency of Liars.
Kevin: The metaphor extends beyond the institution. A lot of workplaces probably feel like John and Jane’s relationship. And certainly millions of Americans feel like they are currently stuck in a bad marriage with a mediocre, entitled white man who has never suffered any consequences for an almost interminable list of bad acts. When constitutionally married to a clownish, vulgar, and vengeful president, it’s also not so easy to get out of the house.
I’d say we are all Melania if she weren’t awfully mediocre herself.
John: I actually see both of these novels as manifestations of contemporary thwarted male rage. In the case of John, he seems to think he’s owed the life of an artist with a helpmeet wife while also being a captain of industry, and when these things don’t materialize he blames not the world, but his wife.
George’s chief victim is often himself, but it is impossible not to recognize the collateral damage of the women in his life, his mother and Jenny. George is a whiny drip. You want to shake him up the same way you’re imploring Jane to get out of the house in Liars, but one of the things I appreciate about what Greathead does in the novel, and something I think is perhaps a subtle comment on the degradations wrought by the patriarchy, is that George is not going to be redeemed in any significant way. He is what he is, and that’s interesting enough for a reader, and perhaps also true to life.
Kevin: The act of reading fiction seems very much in danger, almost any day now, of being entirely supplanted by the playing of Balatro on our phones. So I was heartened that Judge Read used his time with us to interrogate the reasons fiction is important. How fiction acts on us. How we in turn use it. He mentions empathy in particular, and I don’t think it is any coincidence that we seem to be observing a lack of empathy in our culture at the same time readers are becoming scarcer.
On the bright side, I scored a 1.5 billion-chip Balatro hand the other day.
John: I’d never heard of Balatro until just now. Thanks a lot, man.
Kevin: Tomorrow we’ll wrap up the opening round one as Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles meets Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us. We’ll also get our first peek at the departed books that are still in the running for our two Zombie Round resurrections.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Sam, this is Chekhov. He’s a very pretty boy who likes to chew on books and has few thoughts but lots and lots of feelings. He has no frontrunners for the ToB but his mom is obsessed with James right now.
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