Liars by Sarah Manguso

Review by Kate Vine

I could tell you this is an angry book; I still doubt you’d be prepared. In Sarah Manguso’s latest novel, Liars, rage is the main character — sharper and more accented than any of its actual cast. More specifically, women’s rage.

Detailing, with her trademark exactitude, the marriage of Gen X wife Jane, Manguso exposes the abuse inherent in traditional marriage. Jane and her husband John consider themselves victors of the supposed revolution; a union of artists, theirs will be free of traditional constraint, a feminist triumph. Yet it’s this very lie that binds Jane to years of misery.

Unable to accept her fall into the age-old struggle, Jane uses her skills as a storyteller to rewrite reality, blurring fact and fiction as a means of escape. Manguso’s deft prose offers the reader no answers, only a chaotic, shame-ridden journey through Jane’s most pressing question — which of the couple is the biggest liar?

In a recent interview, Manguso claimed that ‘traditional marriage is a domestic abuse paradigm.’ Liars serves as her core exhibit. By dissecting the intricate dynamics between the couple, Manguso paints an all too visceral picture of how John peels his wife apart following the birth of their son.

John’s control is at first practical. Positioning himself as the core breadwinner, he shares none of the labour of childcare or housework, draining Jane of the time or energy to counter, or even question, this arrangement. Foundation laid, his dominance sinks deeper. When offering to massage her sore back, he ignores her instruction: ‘He would decide whether I deserved relief. He would decide whether my pain even existed at all.’

In this way, he deprives her of her most powerful resource: her creative drive. Dependent on John’s income, mother and child are dragged up and down the US, leaving Jane with neither the opportunity nor inspiration for her own written work. Worst of all, he chips away her self-belief: ‘every time I wrote anything, I worried that John would use it to cut me down… I’d asked him to stop, but he never did.’

Manguso punctures Jane’s daily life, its ongoing chores and tedium, with sudden and explosive vignettes of Jane’s rapidly reducing world: ‘There were holes in my days then, through which I dropped out of the bottom of my life and found myself inconsolable by anything in the known world. I visualised hanging myself from the lemon tree.’

But Liars is not about John’s abuse per se: Manguso is interrogating the notion of complicity. Desperate to maintain her belief in the equal, creative partnership she expected, Jane contorts John’s behaviour to fit this story. Narrating with the benefit of hindsight, however, she becomes painfully aware of her participation in his charade.

John’s talents in gaslighting are apparent throughout: ‘John still talked over me, told me my feelings were stupid… left the room in the middle of a conversation, and said it was a reasonable reaction to my being crazy.’

Yet Jane is unable to refute his version of events. ‘His criticism was impossible to reconcile with my insistence that I was happily married, so I refused to acknowledge it,’ she says. ‘My instinct was to pretend that nothing was happening, to protect the sheen of normalcy.’

Perhaps most relatable is Jane’s commitment to marriage as accomplishment, the ingrained romance of this notion. Again, Manguso is brutal.

‘My god, how I’d loved thinking about out long marriage,’ Jane confesses. ‘I’d loved thinking of myself as having the capacity for mature love, which I’d experienced as self-erasure and processed as achievement.’

Though rare, Manguso does offer relief in Jane’s relationship with her son — moments made more significant perhaps by their sparsity. And she deftley differentiates between the love Jane has for her child and the menial labour she is forced to undertake alone. ‘I could express it freely and inhabit it totally, shamelessly… The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of milk into this body, the teaching of how to lift food to the mouth… Nothing, nothing in the world like that.’

It’s not motherhood that Jane resents, but John’s disengagement, and indeed the social structures that still enable and encourage it. ‘All the mothers I knew were in awe of how little we were able to do,’ she says. ‘After all our education, after having been told that we’d be able to do anything.’ At one point, Jane pleads, ‘Please let there be a lesson at the end of this.’ It is likely something readers will think too.

Recent works wit sumilar concerns, such as Leslie Jamison’s Splinters or Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, focus on what can be born from wreckage, the nooks of beauty one can find. In Liars, however, Manguso does not sugarcoat, and Jane’s rage is at times stifling. In Splinters, Jamison’s exploration of the love she shared with her husband provides the foundation for later grief at their split; Manguso offers no such variety. Even prior to marriage and parenthood, it’s difficult to source the joy, or indeed the lie, that Jane fell for. From the first page, John is pretty incorrigible.

That said, this immersion is profoundly effective. Years of grinding abuse would of course colour, even erase, the happiness that preceded them, and Manguso is unwilling to ignore this for the sake of readers’ comfort. She also refuses to project, in Jane’s words, ‘a pretty moral onto a story of deliberate harm’.

Liars is worth the (required) perseverance. Finally shedding John’s lies, his narratives and excuses, Jane uncovers clarity. In seeing and accepting John’s abuse, she finds rage but also freedom — from John and from shame. Here, possibly at her most effective, Manguso presents Jane’s experience as resulting, not from complicity, but from survival instinct, leaning on narratives she could endure until she had strength to fight back. And fight back she does. ‘I had my own money. It would last years,’ Jane says. ‘He’d needed all that power back, so he’d found a different woman, one he thought he could control.’

This is Manguso’s parting message; Jane might be free, but there is another woman — there always will be, until we disassemble the narratives on which abuse is built. For now, we need rage like Jane’s — if that’s what it takes to see things clearly.