"The Liar's Dictionary" by Eley Williams

The Liar's Dictionary has the appearances of a fluffy novel, or at least what "book people" would consider a fluffy novel. It's full of wordplay and obscure vocabulary; it treats lexicographers and dictionaries ambivalently, befitting both the seriousness and absurdity of their work. On a straightforward level, the novel is about a Victorian lexicographer who enters his own made-up words into the dictionary--and a modern assistant who discovers them. Much of the pleasure of the book comes from the recognition in these invented words, the sense of "ah, yes, that should be a word," or even just the sense that, despite the expansiveness of the English language, our words can only say so much. 

But Liar's Dictionary is a quirky book that doesn't quite meet expectations. By the end it's also a mystery or maybe a spy thriller or... I'm not sure? I was more baffled by the ending than I expected, leaving me to wonder if I'd missed something all along.

The novel alternates chapters. First, there's Winceworth, our sad-sack Victorian lexicographer, working on the "S" section of Swansby's Encyclopedic Dictionary. A hundred years later, there's Mallory, the sole intern for the never-finished Swansby's Dictionary, who mostly answers phone calls from a mysterious caller threatening attacks on the building.

Winceworth's chapters focus primarily on his relationship with Sophia, the fiancé of Winceworth's pompous colleague Fransby. What appears to be a story about a burgeoning romance between the two suddenly takes a turn when Winceworth ends up in an exploding train (for real) and Sophia turns out to be a Russian spy (?). The primary message, then, from Winceworth's story is his attempt at immorality through the invented words he sneaks in the dictionary. He realizes his actual person will leave no legacy, but his words can.

Mallory's chapters attend to her dry work at the dictionary, where she's assigned to find the mysterious invented words littered through the dictionary. She also has to contend with the threatening caller, who's presumably angry at the dictionary changing the definition of marriage to include the queer community. Mallory has an enthusiastic girlfriend, Pip, but is not quite out as a lesbian. Mallory and Pip's relationship is more satisfactorily concluded, though her section ends with an exploding building and insurance fraud (?) that I also found largely inexplicable.

Endings and overall cohesiveness aside, The Liar's Dictionary is still largely a fun book. Plus it reminded me of fantastic real words (such as "apricity," the warmth of sun in winter) and contrived ones (such as "agrupt," the irritation caused by having a denouement ruined," which I probably should have understood as a sign of the book's ending).