Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm
reviewed by Emily Nagin

Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm
Viking Press, 2015
Hardcover, 320 pages
Do you know how to spot a valuable antique in a field of junk? How to restore it so cleverly no one would ever guess it had been damaged? The heroine of Rebecca Scherm’s debut novel Unbecoming is a master at repair, at disguising damage, but she also intimately understands how quickly restoration can slide into counterfeit, how counterfeit can become theft. Not just the theft of valuables but of personas, of entire lives. Unbecoming explores lies, how they seduce and snowball out of control, how at their core, all lies are fueled by a deep longing, hurt, and fear. 

Grace, the heroine, restores antiques at a little shop in Paris. Though she grew up in Garland, Tennesse, Grace tells her boss and co-workers that her name is Julie and that she comes from California. She obsessively monitors the Garland, Tennessee newspaper, which is running a series of stories about her high school boyfriend, Riley, and his best friend, Alls. Riley and Alls have just been paroled after serving a three-year prison sentence for a robbing a historical landmark. The novel moves between Grace’s present in Paris and her past in Garland, during the years leading up to the robbery. Grace is torn between the urge to further dissolve her old self and the equally strong urge to confess her crimes. We get the sense that she wants to be caught just as strongly as she fears being caught. The book centers around the seduction of pretense, but it also forces the reader to examine the allure of failure and punishment.
Scherm’s novel is always compelling and often chilling. It contains one of the most articulate passages about lying I’ve ever read: 
“You lie because you know, when asked the question, that there’s a good answer and a bad one…You want to give the good one…to be good. And [other people] want you to, too.” 
Scherm’s characters give the good answer again and again, and in doing so, catch themselves in traps they can’t escape. Scherm raises the stakes of their lies with jewel heists and fraudulent paintings, secret marriages and betrayed husbands, yet the book never feels melodramatic. This is partly due to the clean prose and attention to everyday details: chipped nail polish, underwear balled up on the floor, the careful way a co-worker eats her omelets. Ultimately, however, the book avoids melodrama because Grace is so recognizable. We’ve all been Grace. We’ve all lied, given the good answer again and again, until we’ve backed ourselves into a corner.

In writing about lies, Rebecca Scherm has tapped into a powerful piece of honesty: if lying is shameful, it is also alluring. How many of us tell small lies to keep life simple? So often, lies grease the wheels of romantic and professional relationships—those little lies that become reflexive, almost addictive, and sometimes grow out of control. How many of us have told a lie with the secret hope that saying it aloud will make it true? Grace’s lies are frightening because the huge, life-altering falsehoods she constructs are, at base, expressions of deep longing. This recognition of self is what makes Unbecoming a compulsive, often terrifying, read. In writing a book about fraud, Scherm has created a deeply honest story. Smart and almost impossible to put down, Unbecoming should be read and read again.

 
Emily Nagin is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers' program. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review and Main Street Rag. She is the recipient of a 2014 Hopwood Award in Short Fiction and a 2015 Delbanco Thesis Prize.