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A Novel
by Sarah Manguso
Book Reviewed by:One of the lies that Jane, the narrator and one of the eponymous liars of Sarah Manguso's new novel—chronicling a 14-year marriage and subsequent divorce— tells herself is that she is not a "real wife." Setting the table for her husband's friends feels like "a parlor game"; being mistakenly called by his last name makes her think about how she's "in drag as his wife." Jane is a writer and John is an artist, and their union, she believes, is one of equals, of two likeminded artists, unlike, say, the marriages of women who "changed their names and used the word hubby." And yet immediately after marriage her life is consumed by the practical and emotional labor of wifehood: she handles John's taxes, his travel logistics, shipments of his art, all the housework—because it needs to get done, because her financial life is now intertwined with his, because John reveals a stunning lack of competence for everyday adult tasks. When she asks him "if he'd be better off with a servant-wife than a human wife," he says no, because she already does all the work a servant-wife would do—this is meant to be a compliment, and she, at first, takes it as one.
Soon Jane wants a baby, but "being pregnant and materially dependent on my husband felt dangerous," she thinks. "John seemed to think we could have a child, but I didn't think two artists could raise a child, that there must be a wife somewhere, but I didn't want to be a wife, but if I were a wife, I knew I'd be very good at it." A few pages later, she's a new mother and John, an insecure narcissist from day one, is unsurprisingly unsupportive: "John said that he had nothing to give me because he knew his life was harder than mine. I poured tears for a whole hour. He told me I was acting like a spoiled child, that the postpartum period was so much easier than his life, working at the bank instead of being an artist."
This is how Liars progresses—relentlessly, in short, frustrating moments of contempt, doubt, confusion, and fury. Jane and John move from New York to LA, then back to New York, then back to LA, with a jaunt in the Bay Area, all for John's latest job opportunity, which means Jane can't hold down a teaching job long enough to get tenure. "I heard John on the phone, telling his mother, I might have to move back to New York for these jobs instead of using the first-person-plural pronoun," Manguso writes. "My skin started to fizz with shame. He was the main character, and I was his wife. His mother had also been a wife. Wives and more wives, all the way down."
Why did she marry him? Why doesn't she leave him? One answer is that John is a liar and gaslighter; he tells her and others that she's crazy, and she sometimes believes it. Another is that Jane is also a liar, telling herself she's happy, and she sometimes believes that. Yet another is that this, Jane thinks, seems to be normal for heterosexual partnership: the imbalanced domestic responsibilities, her husband's insecurity about her success: "And yet no married woman I knew was any better off, so I determined to carry on," she says. Manguso has said that Liars was written in a rage after her own divorce, and it reads as an indictment of the whole heterosexual project, the popular notion that the institution of marriage can be or has been updated for the 21st century:
"When I was young I'd sworn I'd never marry. I'd understood, back then, that commitment was a trap that closed off otherwise accessible exit routes. Then I had therapy for ten years and learned that commitment was a gift, the ability to give your heart to another… Then, more than a decade into marriage, I had to learn that it's also the other thing, the trap… I felt stupid, having to relearn something that, thirty years ago, I'd already known."
If this sounds intense or dark or sad, it is, but it's also compulsively readable and often funny, like when John says, straight-faced, "Maybe I can't be a mellow, easygoing guy and also an art star," or when Jane's father calls her smart and she thinks, "I wasn't even smart enough to remember not to get married." And for all the horror scenes from Jane and John's marriage, there are (almost) as many sweet moments of motherhood, descriptions of the intensity of Jane's love for her son, and meditations on how her child has complicated her priorities. "[W]hen I explained that I couldn't conceive of my personal happiness independently from the various needs of my family, these people without children correctly judged that I was describing the opposite of freedom, which is restriction, which, as everyone knows, is bad, while freedom is good," she says. "[But] I was a logical person, and I chose restriction, over and over, because it felt good."
Liars feels more straightforward than Manguso's previous work—linear in narrative and extreme and direct in its argument: that a man will never want an artistic, unconventional partnership more than he wants a "real wife." Readers of Manguso's other books will recognize her themes and preoccupations: Very Cold People, her debut novel based on her childhood in Massachusetts, also takes the form of a writer looking back on her past with an understanding that she didn't possess at the time, or possessed only in some vague, subterranean way. Both books are a relentless series of disturbing scenes that could each be written off as either par for the course or, if particularly bad, aberrations, but taken together reveal a portrait of abuse (Liars) and sexual violence (Very Cold People); the shared central tension is "How much more of this can she take before something gives?" and the shared takeaway is that it is naive and dangerous to think that historical power structures have been dismantled and no longer affect us; that no matter how smart or aware or privileged you are, it can happen to you, too. About a woman who was sentenced to death for murdering men who raped her, Jane thinks, "The difference between me and that woman was one of degree, not type, which is exactly what I'd learned, incidentally, twenty-five years earlier, during the psychiatric hospitalization that John had tried so hard to shame me for. Those of us in the psych ward were just ever so slightly sicker than the general population."
But Liars feels different than Very Cold People—that book is stranger, more associative and disorienting; reading it feels like the narrator, in looking back at her past, has dived into murky, menacing waters, and is excavating memories that are only partially legible through layers of film and grime. Liars, in contrast, is clear-eyed—every scene shines brightly with retrospective anger, as if the narrator has already emerged from the water, her search for lost treasure successful, and has cleaned and sorted the relevant items before laying them out. On the one hand, this feels like a less artistically interesting project, an easier one; on the other, I'm impressed by Manguso's ability to evoke unease and surprise in a story that is so obvious and exaggerated and over-exposed. Jane's is a familiar narrative—one that has been told ten billion times, as she says on page one—but in Manguso's hands it is newly trenchant and chilling.
This review
first ran in the August 21, 2024
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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