A few weeks ago Gretchen from Bimbo reached out to plug her music and, like nerds, we got to emailing back and forth about books. Sarah Manguso‘s second novel Liars was one of her recommendations. Gretchen: Thanks for the suggestion, I owe you one.
It’s the story of Jane, a writer, and John, an artist-turned-filmmaker-turned-something-else, and their 14-year marriage that starts with promise and ends in disaster. The pacing of this book dares you to read it in one sitting, and I nearly did. Liars is one of the most riveting novels I’ve read this year.
It’s written like a memoir. Jane narrates the story with rage and fury, like she’s seething truth through gritted teeth. They marry, have a kid, and then the cracks start to show. John’s a leech—financially, emotionally, and creatively. He borrows $8,000 from Jane for a film and never pays it back, mocks her income while his career flounders, and drags her across the country for his gigs while she’s juggling motherhood and trying to find time to nurture her own promising career.
Every success Jane has is met with resentment from John. His own career starts to look like a bit of a scam, with promises of big paydays followed by sudden flame-outs that go largely unexplained. Eventually, things go from bad to worse and the marriage falls completely apart.
In this interview in Electric Lit, Manguso talks about her need to make it feel concrete:
You mention the incredible specificity of Jane’s account; it was important to me to build a critical mass of concrete details. Jane’s taking things day by day, detail by detail, under the burden of bromides like Marriage takes work. She’s making a good faith attempt to be a partner, to be a wife, to compromise, to sacrifice. She’s living it in real time, though. The reader knows long before Jane does that she is being abused.
There are sections of this book that read almost like a horror novel – people behaving so awfully toward each other that you’re almost reading through your fingers. It’s so real and so visceral that I had to double check that this wasn’t autofiction: it’s hard to imagine someone making up this level of cruelty in a relationship:
John said 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…I wanted neither a divorce nor a disdainful partner, so there I was, hoping for a third option.
Manguso’s writing feels very of-the-moment, in the way that All Fours or No One is Talking About This do. Like it could only have been written right now – not so much because of the content or cultural references, but because of the energy. I wrote last week about Scaachi Koul being a rare modern writer who is identifiable by her prose alone, and I’d add Manguso to that list. I haven’t read any of her other works, but thanks to Gretchen, I’ll seek it out.
