Sarah Manguso’s “Liars,” Reviewed | The New YorkerIs the End of Marriage the Beginning of Self-Knowledge?
In “Liars,” Sarah Manguso presents divorce as a way for women to reassert an essential identity that’s been effaced by coercive social scripts.
By August 5, 2024
Manguso’s narrator is in full wilt, exhausted by trying (and failing) to balance full-time parenthood with her work as a writer and a teacher.Illustration by Ard Su
Sex, like hemlines, follows fashions of its own, if novels are to be believed. The eighteen-hundreds was the peak era for the covert carriage assignation, and early-twentieth-century fiction revelled in sex al fresco—leave your britches on the riverbank, step right in for your marshy and mystical Lawrentian communion. The nineteen-sixties saw some awestruck, and genuinely ghastly, odes to anal sex by Norman Mailer and James Salter (from “A Sport and a Pastime”: “She rolls over and in the full daylight he slowly inserts this gleaming declaration”). Sadism bordering on snuff was all the rage in the nineties, in the work of Dennis Cooper, Heather Lewis, and Susanna Moore. In the past decade, in what has been called the “millennial sex novel,” masochism had a heyday, as sad-eyed young women in books by Sally Rooney, Miranda Popkey, and Raven Leilani slouched forward with plaintive appeals to be hit and hurt, just a little.
And lately? Lately, our heroines can’t keep their hands off themselves. The signature sex act du jour might be the furtive solo session, at least according to new novels such as Miranda July’s “All Fours,” Eva Baltasar’s “Mammoth,” and Kimberly King Parsons’s “We Were the Universe.” “It’s not that I want to masturbate in the vestibule of the Tiny Toads gymnastics class, specifically,” the narrator of Parsons’s novel confesses—and yet. These scenes are very often fun, filthy, hot, and, frankly, a relief after so much doleful, droopy coupling. It might be overkill to mine them for meaning, but their significance feels overt: these self-sufficient women star in stories that are very often about self-understanding, about locating and reasserting an essential identity that’s drowning beneath the commotion of work and family life. It’s been the mood of the moment, to judge by the best-seller lists, on which July’s novel is one of many books about the marital crises of white women in their forties. Memoirs by Leslie Jamison, Maggie Smith, and Lyz Lenz revise the well-worn story in which art-making and child rearing are pitted against each other. Babies, it turns out, have been falsely accused; babies, these writers suggest, were never really to blame. It was the husbands all along—husbands who were useless with the children and domestic duties, who themselves needed constant care, whose envy of their wives’ professional success could drip a slow stream of poison into the marriage. In “Splinters,” Jamison recounts preparing for a nineteen-city book tour. Her husband at the time, also a writer, once told her, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand there holding your purse.”
Jane, they’re singing your song. The narrator of Sarah Manguso’s new novel, “Liars” (Hogarth), lies awake next to her husband, dully, resentfully making herself come. “The smell of a woman’s cunt on her own fingers, I wrote in my notebook that night. It felt important,” she tells us. This is what passes for epiphany for the solemn, solitary Jane, who searches for self-knowledge in a woebegone key. She is in full wilt, exhausted by trying (and failing) to balance full-time parenthood with her work as a writer and a teacher, to say nothing of her constant itinerancy; she and her husband, John, move six times in eight years, as he founds (or is fired from) a series of businesses. Feckless, beautiful John. Jane desires him terribly—his heavy limbs and cedar smell, his “raucous black bloom of pubic hair”—even as he squanders their money, even as he refuses to touch her. In the next room, she can hear him on the phone with another woman. Told in tight vignettes, gusts of fury, the novel is not so much the story of the slow implosion of a marriage over the years as it is the black box found amid its wreckage, a play-by-play accounting, from Jane’s point of view, of her own annihilation.
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You’ll recognize Jane. She’s a familiar Manguso character—laconic, deadpan, elaborately controlled (at least at first)—if not a version of the author herself. Manguso’s middle name is Jane, and their lives overlap; several events in the novel have shown up in Manguso’s first memoir, “The Two Kinds of Decay” (2008), and in her autobiographical book “Ongoingness: The End of a Diary” (2015). The similarities don’t feel hidden or coy. Manguso has spoken of her husband abruptly leaving her, in 2020, and she gives John elements of his background and similar artistic ambitions.
John worries about becoming a footnote in Jane’s biography. “He said he didn’t want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person,” she says. “Then he apologized and said that he’d just wanted to be honest. I said, It was brave and considerate to tell me.” Unlike Jamison’s memoir, in which we see a loving relationship turn sour, “Liars” makes the rot in this marriage visible from the beginning. John does not conceal his insecurity or entitlement. Jane, in turn, admits her contempt: “I noticed that he used the word phenomena as a singular noun, couldn’t spell the word necessary, couldn’t write a coherent paragraph. Next to him, I was brilliant. Next to me, he was beautiful, charming, and initially capable of hiding all the things that, in my wrinkly little heart, made me consider him inferior.” His haplessness confounds her. A framed picture falls on the floor one day and shatters. After sweeping up, John jokes, “Being an adult is really annoying.” “Had he never swept a floor?” Jane wonders. “I tucked away the little shard of the day because I couldn’t imagine that it could be true, that he would actually think what he appeared to be thinking.” In “Liars,” Jane empties her pockets and lets fall more than a decade’s worth of painstakingly hoarded splinters and shards. She begins to tally: “By noon I’d showered, dressed, tidied the house of John’s shoes and clothes, put away laundry, swept the floor, watered the garden, moved boxes to the garage, cooked breakfast, eaten, done the dishes, taken out the recycling, handled correspondence, and made the bed. John had gotten up and taken a shit.”
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The book is a balance sheet. Jane documents a few serious, even scary episodes. She slaps him; he shoves her. On one occasion, he is found drunk, passed out on a sidewalk; a terrified and heavily pregnant Jane mops up his vomit and tries to sleep on the floor of the emergency room as he is scanned for a brain bleed. The majority of the incidents, however, are what the writer Dawn Powell described as the “pinpricks” of domestic life. John washes most but not all of the dishes. John does the dishes, but he puts the refillable seltzer bottles in the dishwasher and melts them. John forgets to clean the cutting boards. John forgets to buy the muesli. John arrives late to parties and forgets the gifts. John buys another stack of comic books and spends too much money on cheese again. John promises to vacuum but pleads back spasms. John spends forty dollars on sushi. John promises to be home before eleven o’clock to fuck Jane; at eleven o’clock, Jane, alone at home, begins washing the dishes.
Virtuous Jane! Jane spot-cleans, area-cleans, rage-cleans, and nurses the baby seven times. Jane plays Mozart for the child. Jane plays “Rhapsody in Blue” for the child. Jane makes origami polyhedra with the child. Jane kneads two batches of cookie dough—after her hysterectomy! Jane packs and unpacks their belongings, hires and fires babysitters. Jane gets John’s phone turned back on after he forgets to pay his bill. Jane makes herself come, again. Jane roasts carrots. Jane, pointedly, does not include any information that challenges or complicates her version of events.
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John’s surname—Bridges—recalls Evan S. Connell’s paired novels, “Mrs. Bridge” (1959) and “Mr. Bridge” (1969), which tell the story of a marriage from the perspective of each half of a deeply repressed Midwestern couple. The books have provided a template of sorts for recent fiction like “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and “Fates and Furies,” in which we get the husband’s and the wife’s interpretations, each of them annotating the other’s story. “Liars,” however, belongs only to Jane. It is her aria—of laundry loads and slights—as she repeats the details of her life back to herself in disbelief: “Every day I had to write it all down again so I could see it all in one place, but it didn’t sink in. I kept having to say the same things over and over.”
Why do you stay? a neighbor asks, listening to her litany. After a screaming fight, after John admits that he cannot contribute to the joint bank account that month, after Jane cries “from the deepest part of the pain tank,” she admits, “I understood why people divorce.” The reader’s heart lifts—see Jane run?—but then drops, realizing that there are more than two hundred pages to go. Eventually, it’s John who will leave, for another woman, and Jane who will beg him to stay.
“Liars” was not a novel Manguso intended to write. She had a contract for a different book, a long-planned study of whiteness and migration to New England, marrying history, sociology, and her own family’s story. She has approached such topics before, in her novel “Very Cold People” (2022), which explores the wages of secrecy around sexual violation in a small Massachusetts town. Writers are often encouraged to find their voices, but it has always been Manguso’s silences that have felt distinctive—she is a sculptor of omission, distinguishing what has not been said from what cannot be said. Negative space is a key feature of her form. In “The Two Kinds of Decay,” she describes undergoing treatment for a rare neurological disease, during which her blood plasma was removed and replaced more than fifty times. “I was brought upstairs from Emergency to Intensive Care and given a treatment called apheresis,” she writes. “From the Greek aphairein, to take away. In the hematological context, apheresis is the process of separating blood into its components (red cells, white cells, platelets, plasma), removing the component that’s sick.” Much of Manguso’s writing pursues a similar effect in its calm, cool fragmentation, which slows down the narration and allows her to carve away as much as she can in order to isolate pure states of being. “Ongoingness” is a distillation of her eight-hundred-thousand-word diary, less interested in preserving a record than in capturing the essence of the desire to preserve. Her collection “300 Arguments” (2017) is even more compressed, comprising mostly aphorisms (“inner beauty can fade, too”), just the lines Manguso imagines being underlined in a much longer book.
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“Liars” seems, at first, like a departure from her aloof, even icy work of the past. Here the writing scalds and gives the appearance of holding nothing back. But key omissions are, in fact, central to its architecture. John’s version of events—his intentions and perspective—is entirely absent. Jane does not seem to entertain them, nor does Manguso. There is a strange lack of motive in the book. We receive blurry, shifting notions of why the couple act as they do: why they married, why they hurt each other. Instead, from the opening lines, from the very names—John and Jane—there is a sense of a universal story being unfurled, a fable. “In the beginning I was only myself,” Jane says. “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.”
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The Epic Promise of Wedding VowsA woman marries, and she steps into—and is effaced by—a story and a script. There are no choices to interrogate, no motive to examine; the why is a given. It is patriarchy. Even Jane’s desire for her husband, the thing that binds her to him, is beyond her volition. It is biology. Her body wants him, despite herself. She is commandeered by her ever-optimistic eggs, her hormones: “I ovulated hard, as I always did then. I ovulated like a mother. Every time John was kind to me, my body immediately responded. It wanted me to get pregnant again.” To ask why she stays, why she suffers, borders on offense. “No married woman I knew was any better off, so I was determined to carry on,” she says. “I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew. It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry. Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. Infants are angry.”
Manguso presents Jane’s logic not as a curiosity, not as intriguingly unreliable narration, but as primal truth. The book is called “Liars” because both husband and wife are lying; Jane, Manguso suggests, lies to conceal her exploitation and abuse from herself. A reader could be forgiven for thinking that Jane is also lying to herself about her own impulses. When a journalist visits her for an interview, she is strangely compelled to sexually service him. “Even though I wasn’t attracted to him and would have been disgusted if I’d had to kiss him, having an unfamiliar cock in the house made me want to suck and fuck it. I couldn’t tell if the urge was entirely separate from my habit of locating any nearby need for emotional labor and immediately fulfilling it, but it didn’t matter. Either way, when an entire civilization tells you that you owe that cock a good suck and fuck, it isn’t a personal failure when you give in. You’ve been coerced.”
What is this vision of womanhood, of sexually indiscriminate infants running households? For all her subtlety, Manguso has always evinced a tendency to make broad, sometimes crude generalizations, to break the world into types. In “Very Cold People,” characters lose any sense of individuality or inner life after experiencing abuse—they become lumped together as “all the Waitsfield girls,” reduced to the sheer fact of a suffering that seems not merely inevitable but ordained. Such simplification shaded into something uglier in “The Two Kinds of Decay.” Manguso describes one of her doctors bungling a procedure, writing, with rage and disgust, about his clumsiness, his body odor. She never names him, but he provides the chapter heading: “The Sikh.” My breath catches every time I recall it, her easy, unembarrassed way of not only reducing the man to his identity but having his identity announce the chapter, float over it, as if to explain his incompetence, his smell.
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Manguso’s secret weapon has always been the sudden, blunt moment of self-implication—her disappointment, for example, in her first memoir, when she realizes that her illness has not made her a better person but, rather, transformed her into a monster of entitlement. That book, however, was written after seven years of remission. “Liars” seems to have been written in the heat of the crisis. “The blood jet” is what Sylvia Plath called her sudden outpouring of poetry after Ted Hughes left her for another woman. But novels require different fuel; among their essential ingredients are doubt and time. This book, in its blazing assurance, tells a thin and partial tale, frayed by silences that feel more like blind spots than like the canny omissions of old. A writer, lancing and fluent on what cannot be said, founders here in her inability to reckon with what she has yet to see.
Signed and sealed, “Liars” is almost impenetrable in its self-conviction—but there is a clue to understanding it, embedded in the acknowledgments. Manguso thanks the cartoonist Tracy Schorn “and the life-saving community of Chump Nation,” an online network of people who follow Schorn’s writing on infidelity. Manguso became a daily visitor to their forums after her husband left her; it was, she said on Schorn’s podcast, her therapy. The group shares a particular vocabulary and framework for understanding infidelity. The betrayed party is “the chump,” the cheater is a “fuckwit,” and the cheating partner is, incredibly, “the schmoopie.” A chump minimizing a fuckwit’s harm is said to be engaged in “spackling.” For the chump to compete with the schmoopie for the fuckwit’s attention is to do the “pick-me dance.” To try to understand the cheater’s motivation is to be entangled in “the skein of crazy.” Chump Nation has a mission to reframe cheating as abuse and to push back against “the reconciliation-industrial complex.” “Lose a cheater, gain a life” is the motto.
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These steely certainties, swaddled in baby talk and baby thinking, are the unfortunate scaffolding of “Liars,” which employs language not of harm, hurt, or humiliation but of domestic abuse. “It’s the critical mass of details that makes John’s abuse impossible to deny,” Manguso said on the podcast. “We need to get specific when we talk about covert domestic abuses.” Heterosexual marriage itself is regarded as only questionably consensual. “We are impelled to make this bad choice,” Manguso added. “The entire civilization is screaming it at us . . . from the cradle.”
A little proportion, please. As the product of generations of arranged marriages, a number of them coerced, I find that such claims feel strange, if not obscene. It’s not merely that bandying around these neon words—abuse, coercion—dilutes their power; it’s that these words are being deployed to foreclose thought and impose silences of their own. Chump Nation cautions against posing too many questions about why someone cheats, about marital dynamics or psychology, to avoid revictimizing the chump. The finality of such diagnoses stunts Manguso’s account, keeps it from becoming a more persuasive story, where we would genuinely feel for and trust the protagonist, experience the full measure of her loss and exploitation. There are occasional glimpses of a more complex portrait. (Manguso is too interesting a writer to hew completely to the program.) “Being ignored—was that my trigger?” Jane wonders, considering an old pattern with John. “For rage and, somehow, also, for desire? It turns me on when you ignore me.” Later, when considering her own decisions, her orientation toward freedom or constraint, she admits to herself, “I was a logical person, and I chose restriction, over and over, because it felt good.”
“Is the end of the marriage plot the beginning of a woman’s self-knowledge?” the writer Joanna Biggs, reflecting on her recent book about divorce, “A Life of One’s Own,” asked in the Guardian. It can be, Biggs finds, if an individual can embrace plotlessness for a time, if she is willing to reëxamine her premises and her path, to think. To do so, to try to understand, is not an act of exoneration but an act of attention. And attention, as Manguso noted in her first memoir, is “suffering’s lesson.” “Pay attention,” she wrote. “The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.” Stay alert, stay inquisitive. Don’t just trade one lie for another. Don’t be that chump. ♦
Published in the print edition of the
August 12, 2024, issue, with the headline “Divorce Story.”
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