Sarah Manguso’s “Liars,” Reviewed | The New Yorker
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.
“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.”
A 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.
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.
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. ♦
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