SEVEN LIES
by James Lasdun
Jonathan Cape £14.99, 208 pages

In James Lasdun’s first novel, The Horned Man, the narrator, Lawrence Miller, an English academic teaching at a small college in upstate New York, recalls an episode of acute embarrassment from his adolescence. He was disgraced in front of his step-sister and her friends, and admits that he has “distrusted [himself] ever since”, withdrawing into an “attitude of detached neutrality” when not simply acquiescing in the disdain that others show towards him.

Readers of Lasdun’s short stories will already be familiar with characters who inhabit their lives as if they were not their own. The Horned Man took that psychic displacement and made it the motor for a terse and beautifully controlled Gothic thriller.

Seven Lies, Lasdun’s second novel, is also fitted out with bits of thriller apparatus. It is better understood as a kind of Bildungsroman, however - a novel about a person’s formative years, albeit one where the narrator feels that his life is something that has fallen “unaccountably” into his possession.

As with Lawrence Miller, the narrator of Seven Lies is an exile: now an American citizen, Stefan Vogel fled the German Democratic Republic in 1986 with his actress wife Inge, in exchange, he notes, for “two truckloads of grade B Seville oranges”.

The novel opens at a party given by a wealthy New York heiress for an assortment of dissident emigres and politicians. During the party Stefan has a glass of wine thrown over him by a woman he doesn’t know, but who appears to know who he is. This eruption, which Lasdun records with characteristically gorgeous precision (a “ruby hemisphere” of wine explodes from the glass into “elongated fingers” which land in a “great crimson splatter”), strikes Stefan as shocking yet somehow inevitable; to be endured like the weather.

He reaches back into his past, less to explain the immediate mystery of the woman with the wine (though this is settled, slightly perfunctorily, at the end of the book) than to account for his sense that what occurred at the party “happened a thousand years ago, and was therefore nothing new”. If Stefan is being punished for some obscure betrayal, it is one that occurred in his previous life in the GDR. The bulk of the novel comprises Stefan’s account, from the vantage point of his apparently comfortable American exile, of the long hiatus between a defining family disgrace in East Germany in the mid-1970s and his final, long-dreamed escape to the US, three years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Stefan’s father is a member of the East German delegation at the United Nations. He is in line for a permanent posting in New York when his family’s dreams of establishing themselves in the “magically enriching soil of the New World” are dashed after he is deemed to have shown an excess of generosity in arms negotiations. His wife’s response to “receiving [this] disadvantage” is to reinvent herself as the host of a salon for writers and intellectuals. Stefan is designated the family’s “poet-intellectual”, and though he in no way merits this title, he colludes in his mother’s fantasy.

When he is asked to read some of his poetry at one of her gatherings, he simply plagiarises a prose translation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and succeeds in passing it off as his own. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously acknowledged receipt of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass by sending a greeting to the poet “at the beginning of a great career”; Stefan’s subterfuge is the beginning of his career of “devious concealment” to which the title of the novel refers. Thereafter, Whitman occupies a place in Stefan’s private nomenclature between Walt Disney and the German word Witz, meaning joke or wit.

Later, after leaving university, Stefan takes a job with a government department that produces anti-American propaganda. He finds the work fulfilling, primarily because it revives his “relationship with America”, though of course his “inward devotion” to an American future has to be disguised as “outward hostility”.

This preoccupation with the way in which America, or a certain idea of America, colonises the imaginations of those outside its borders was a feature of The Horned Man, too. There, Lawrence is simultaneously fascinated and repelled by America’s overpowering vastness, which he experiences as a promise but also as a “physical encumbrance”. Here, the US is both the distant focus for all the young Stefan’s “cravings” and, when he finally arrives there with Inge, the seeming fulfilment of them. The pages that Lasdun devotes to the couple’s early days in New York are among the most beautiful in the book. They are a reminder that the author is a poet as well as a novelist - a passage in which Stefan describes his wonder at “illuminated tiers of fruit and vegetables [and] forests of flowers spilling out their scent and colour” could be from Bellow, so expressive is it of sublime superabundance. And it is this descriptive brilliance, rather than the easy ingenuity of the novel’s closing plot twists, that leaves a lasting impression.

To buy this book at 20 per cent discount call the FT ordering service on 0870 429 5884 or go to www.ft.com/bookshop