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A Novel
by Sarah Manguso
Book Reviewed by:A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all—from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.
A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.
When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it's not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John's ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.
As Jane's career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.
Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.
Excerpt
Liars
In the beginning I was only myself. Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone.
Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.
But before all that, back at the beginning, I remember looking out the door of my apartment, watching John's head appear as he climbed the stairs, and then, step by step, more and more of him. Which is when I said, You're real!
Which was my first mistake.
* * *
Upstate for the summer, I was house-sitting and making vigorous use of the fireplace. I walked by the Hudson and sometimes swam. The locals said that you could pick through the river bottom and find pure garnets, but I never found any, so I tried to write poems about not finding them.
I pretended that the house was mine, and that I'd paid it off and lived alone. I pretended I was fifty years old and had published many books translated into many languages. I ...
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. 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...continued
Full Review
(1250 words)
(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).
Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
A triumph and a revelation ... Despite its title, this might be the most honest marriage novel I have ever read. Sarah Manguso's writing is furious, elegant, bitter, tender, frightening, and deeply funny. I loved this book. Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
I read Liars in one breathless, refuse-to-be-interrupted sitting. I was walloped on every page—by the painful familiarity of the story, by the all-at-onceness of the life described in these pages, by the brilliance of Manguso's storytelling. I'm going to be returning to—and learning from—this book for years. Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and Just Like You
A white-hot dissection of the power imbalances in a marriage, and as gripping as you want fiction to be. Any spouse that has ever argued about money, time, work and childcare should read it. Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
I couldn't put it down. An astounding feat, spanning a fourteen-year marriage with concision and specificity ... It sliced all the way through me. So many women will connect with this book.
Sarah Manguso is a poet, essayist, and novelist who is known for, among other things, her short compositional units: all of her non-poetry books are made up of short sections—sometimes just a line; sometimes a longish paragraph—separated by the white space of a line break. Her first few books take the form of a series of nonfiction vignettes, almost prose poems—a review of one of her books described her work as squatting "on a perch between prose and poetry." Her 2017 book 300 Arguments is a collection of short, aphoristic essays—most of them no more than a few sentences. Even her new novel Liars, which, in a departure for her, proceeds straightforwardly in time instead of piecing different moments together, has no ...
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