True Story: offbeat debut about an alleged sexual assault

“But the story is mine only as the victim owns the prosecution, or the whale the harpoon.” The importance of owning the narrative in the wake of a sexual assault is the timely focus of Kate Reed Petty’s debut novel. Featuring an eccentric mix of different genres – literary fiction, horror, psychological thriller – the fragmented structure of True Story mirrors the content, exploring the fractured remains of one girl’s life and reputation following an allegation of sexual assault.

Multiple narrators and perspectives alert us to the fallibility of storytelling, the blurring of fact and fiction, the unreliability of memory, and the power of a group when it comes to swaying opinion. A short prologue from the victim, Alice – now living in Barcelona in her late 20s – shows the far-reaching effects of an assault that took place during her high school days in Baltimore.

This gives way to the most impressive section of the novel, a first-person-plural narrative through the lens of Nick, a lacrosse player whose team members stand accused of the assault. There is an immediacy to the voice that lands us straight into the macho, oppressive world of team sports and the imperative to support your teammates at all costs.

Nick’s youth and impressionability is well rendered, as is the predatory culture of the lacrosse scene: “Let’s all set goals, gentlemen, and then we went around and said which girl was going to blow us before Christmas.”

In this visceral first quarter, the book has echoes of Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word and Sarah Bannan’s Weightless, both of which offer intricate pictures of transgression in close-knit American communities. Some readers will be disappointed when True Story moves away from this territory. Not everything that follows reads as fluidly.

Tonal shift

A section with an overly attentive boyfriend/psychopath lacks depth compared with previous parts, reading more like horror pulp. Although it is a deliberate choice by the author, the writing style slackens considerably with this move into genre. In part three we meet Nick as an alcoholic who has dispensed with full sentences: “Slipped the whiskey pint in his jacket pocket. Pleased with how neatly it fit. Walked to his car.”

The style is not problematic in its own right but becomes an issue when it continues in the same vein in subsequent parts with Alice as narrator: “Worked temp jobs to pay the bills. Pitched pop culture think pieces to Rolling Stone online for pennies an hour. Raised my profile, or tried to.” Elsewhere, the metafictional aspects become convoluted at times and there are a few too many knowing nods: “It’s a perfectly composed scene. Like a noir film still.”

Despite these issues, there is a lightness to Petty’s genre hopping that will keep readers entertained throughout. The horror scripts are so terrible they’re great. The plot twists in later sections, where Alice works as a ghostwriter for rich businessmen, keep us guessing until the end. Even her friendship with Haley, her lone supporter back in the days of the assault, has interesting developments.

What are Haley’s motives in trying to help her friend overcome her past? Are they entirely selfless? The boys of the lacrosse team would say no – “Haley always was an ambulance chaser” – but the answer to these questions are far knottier to untangle, something that is again reflected in the book’s form.

Sardonic wit

Petty is a clever writer with a sardonic wit. In the less believable parts of the book, such as Alice’s stint with Q, there are still moments that ping: “Neither of us knew where we were headed. A new impasse. It almost makes me laugh, now, to write it, because it sounds like just one of those things that happens in relationships. We never talk anymore. We want different things, aren’t sure how to communicate. Also one of us is poisoning me.”

For a book with strong feminist overtones, it is perhaps surprising that the strongest voice, and the most seamless writing, come in the form of Nick. With this outsider figure, we see another life derailed, a man unwilling to confront truth and who drinks in order to help himself escape from it: “You take the second sip to dull the disappointment, and to stave off a thick wave of guilt you feel rising inside. The second sip tastes a little better. Everything is better with lower expectations.”

Petty’s success is to give voice to these characters in stasis whose lives have forever been altered by a true-or-false story in the past.