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Linden MacIntyre, author of Why Men Lie is photographed at Random House offices in Toronto, March 27, 2012.Kevin Van Paassen

The incident that turned acclaimed journalist Linden MacIntyre into an award-winning and bestselling novelist was too gruesome to depict on television at the time, in the early 1980s, and could only ruin any story intended to promote Why Men Lie, the third of the three novels it helped to inspire. But with the consequences-be-damned integrity of an old-time reporter – and proving his claim that he has neither the talent nor the taste for publicity – MacIntyre spares no detail.

Something fell from the bucket of a front-end loader excavating bodies from a blown-to-pieces hovel in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut 30 years ago, site of a massacre in which hundreds, perhaps thousands died. "It's a little hand attached to about that much arm," MacIntyre said in an interview in Toronto recently, indicating with two fingers of his own one hand, "probably somebody a year old or younger."

It landed at his feet. "And as I was looking at that, somebody came along and picked it up and carefully put it on a stretcher. This little piece of flesh with this very distinct little hand – and they put it on a freaking stretcher and walked away with it."

It was five years later that the experience registered its deepest impact, according to MacIntyre, after he completely broke down in an attempt to talk about it. "I got completely paralyzed; I couldn't talk," he said. "And afterwards I was thinking: If that one experience, where I look at one part of somebody I never saw before, paralyzes my voice five years later, what about the people who may have known that child?"

The entire world is populated by people whose lives were profoundly influenced by similar acts of violence in the genocidal 20th century, MacIntyre realized. "And that was a story I was never going to be able to put on TV or in the paper," he said. "So I started thinking, How can I tell that story?" And he became a novelist.

As seminal as it proved to his career, that epiphany is a misleading introduction to Why Men Lie, MacIntyre's follow-up to The Bishop's Man, winner of the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The small act of violence that migrates through both novels, unbeknownst to most of its main characters, occurs offstage and in the past. The Bishop's Man explores its effect on the perpetrator's son, "a priest who becomes a priest for all the wrong reasons," according to MacIntyre, and earns his keep covering up clerical sex abuse. Why Men Lie follows its redounding course through the eyes and life of the priest's sister, an outwardly successful academic in turn-of-the-century Toronto.

Despite that tie, the new novel is very different from its topical predecessor. Instead of a sinister, fundamentally amoral institution, it focuses on the failings of middle-aged men as seen through the eyes of a woman who both suffers from and abets them.

Determined to explore "this question of what happens to male behaviour and self-confidence when all those things that define manhood diminish," MacIntyre began writing the novel from the point of view of one of those very characters. "And it just didn't work," he said. "My male character was just never believable. I didn't even care what he was whining about."

Blocked, he switched strategies and began writing from the viewpoint of Effie MacAskill, one of two female "leftover characters" from The Bishop's Man. "And it started to happen," MacIntyre said. "There's none of the original book in here. It is completely original, but based on the same idea: Why do men get weird? It matters to a woman to figure this out, and Effie has had a lot of exposure to a lot of weird men, so she has a lot of ideas."

One early reviewer has already complained that neither Effie nor the rogue's gallery of weird men who define and deform her life – beginning critically with her abusive father – provide an easy answer to the provocative question posed in the book's title. But there isn't one, according to MacIntyre. "It's not like why water boils at whatever the temperature is," he said. The answers are multiple and complex. That's why he wrote a novel, not an exposé – an approach that worked brilliantly with The Bishop's Man, which won a large mainstream audience precisely because of its thoughtful, deliberately unsensational treatment of a difficult subject.

Not that MacIntyre, 68, has any plans to abandon his job as co-host of CBC-TV's the fifth estate. "After the Giller people said, 'Well surely you can quit the journalism and start writing now.' I said, 'Writing about what? You write about life,' " MacIntyre exclaimed. "I don't want to sit down in my pyjamas, writing stuff completely out of my head. I want to be back at work, I want to be getting mad, I want to be getting frustrated, I want to be bouncing off interesting people."

In the meantime, he is hard at work on a fourth novel, following a parallel path that has made a busy life "a little busier." Writing thoughtful, non-commercial fiction was never part of any plan, according to MacIntyre. "It just happened to be something I couldn't not do."

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