Review: Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart

Being the only person on Earth underwhelmed by E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars, I wasn’t super thrilled to dive into Genuine Fraud. But since I’m a Ruby Oliver diehard, I felt obligated to give this one — a Victorian-inspired suspense novel — a chance.

Our protagonist is Jule, who’s on the run. It’s a lush sort of run, hanging out at beach resorts, flirting with bartenders and calling herself Imogen, her best friend’s name. Speed forward a little bit, and Jule’s discovered by a cop and has to flee, putting the narrative in reverse as we unravel what Jule’s running away from and what happened to Imogen.

Everything unfolds a bit like a movie, with very little in the way of interiority. There’s little thinking, but lots of action. This lack of understanding of Jule’s motivations is a quick and superficial way to invest in her story, but it fizzles fast. That being said, Lockhart is incredibly economical in her writing here, not wasting single bit of page space. Every detail serves a purpose. Ones that don’t either don’t exist or are kept very short. Things that feel unimportant (like a mention of slices of lemon falling into a hot tub) end up being important later. The tight pace and plot are appreciated, and I’m tempted to go back and see what finer details I may have missed, but Genuine Fraud doesn’t feel worth the trouble.

It’s billed as a suspense novel but doesn’t have much of it, unfolding too predictably to be satisfying. Even when it looks like there may be more to this story, there isn’t. Jule, and the book, draw a bit too much on The Talented Mr. Ripley (though Lockhart says she was “inspired” by it, she and Random House would have been better off just calling this a retelling). Even if you’re not well-versed in Mr. Ripley (I have only cursory knowledge myself), you really only need a couple of B-List suspense movies about girls who are bit too admirable of their best friends and their glamorous lifestyles to know where Genuine Fraud is headed.

This might have been saved by the characters, but as it was, I was completely apathetic toward them. That being said, the characters triggered a familiar dislike I’d experienced when reading Victorian authors — like Dickens (another of Lockhart’s inspirations) so I’m inclined to put the characters into the plus column if only for lining up with Lockhart’s inspo.

Jule, in particular, felt more and more cardboard as the book went on. I attribute this to the predictability of the narrative (the more Victorian the book becomes, the more obvious all its answers are). For a book that often mentions the ho-hum “great white hetero hero”, it doesn’t work too hard at setting itself — or Jule — apart. She is, quite literally, a “great white hetero hero” herself, she just happens to be female (unlike the oft-mentioned Jason Bourne and James Bond). Squeezed in are recurring tangents of zoomed out action, like a tracking shot in an action movie that reads not unlike a Taylor Swift song (think “Look What You Made Me Do, not the superior “Blank Space”):

“You are the center of the story. You and no one else. You’ve got that interesting origin tale, that unusual education. Now you’re ruthless, you’re brilliant, you’re practically fearless.”

While it wouldn’t be a Matt Damon-type playing Jule in a movie adaptation (he played Jason Bourne and Mr. Ripley onscreen), it would be a Scarlett Johanssen-type and not a whole lot different.

Genuine Fraud is out on Tuesday, September 5.