By Helen Elliott
FICTION
Liars
Sarah Manguso
Picador, $39.99
Jane is an American poet who is starting to get the attention of those who count in her (admittedly) rarefied world. She is flourishing, enjoying who she is, who she is becoming, who she might eventually be.
Then. Jane. Meets. John.
John is a Canadian who has always had the attention of women because of all those reasons women know about, too many and too banal to iterate. (Jane wanted to have sex with him the moment she saw him. ) Consequently, John has never really had to work on himself because women have always freely given him everything he needed: sex, money, houses, no children.
He peaked in his art world early, and now he messes around with photography, he does stuff, he knows people. He starts companies that make films. He makes money and loses it. When Jane first sees his flat she’s surprised by the dirt and chaos because he is a capable man who likes fixing things, building gadgets. Part of his charm. Although he never finishes anything, never follows through. But Jane is enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.
As I said, too frantically ordinary to mention. Petty? Well, if you want to use that word, but mentioning, listing, finessing the entire catalogue for men like John is Sarah Manguso’s gift to the world. Ordinary but not banal, not petty but critical. John isn’t named John for idle reasons. And alas, Jane isn’t named Jane without deliberation. Both are liars.
Sarah Manguso wrote Liars in the wake of her own marriage breakdown.Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Liars is Manguso’s second novel of nine books. Her first, Very Cold People, came out to acclaim two years ago. Liars, like Very Cold People, is notable for style as much as content. Between two covers Manguso wraps a fastidious package of smaller, equally fastidious packets of observation so exacting, so ablaze with truth, it must be handled with tweezers. The result is a taxonomy of wifedom.
Her style is geared to forensic max in Liars, detailing all those things considered beneath the interest of a snappy catalogue, the museum of almost-nothingness sometimes called “wifework” that makes up, shapes and finally extinguishes entire lives. Mainly female lives, it has to be said. Jane’s transformation from a woman who finds pleasure in being her imaginative, creative self into John’s wife is annotated with the coolest eye. Yet Manguso has said that she wrote it in the heat of an obliterating rage, starting on it four days after her husband walked out on her and their small son after 14 years of marriage.
She also wrote it very fast, although it has been scrupulously edited and legalled. It is fiction, she says, not autobiography - she has a son to protect - although her husband walking out enabled her in ways she had never before experienced. The speed must have something to do with this strip-search of a marriage.
Elif Batuman, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Elena Ferrante - Manguso must be included with these writers because they all go as far as they can and then further as they attempt to uncover certain ways of being in the world that are specific to women. Courageously, they insist on addressing complexity, despite understanding that there is going to be no complete understanding and certain resistance.
Jane has no understanding of how she came to be in her bizarre situation, 1950s wife in the 2020s. Although there is a clue in her early comment about her love for John: I tried to understand that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.
This getting beyond reason is the thing Ferrante does so startlingly, and which caused readers to recognise first with the heart, then with the head. What these writers are doing is fashioning a new language to speak about the unseen and unspeakable, to write against the canon but towards new ways of reading and understanding. It has nothing to do with hating men; Manguso loves men - well, certain men. She loves sex with men, although she tartly calls the frequent sex in this novel sessions.
Sex, finally, truthfully, doesn’t have to be central. It raises the question about how central it is in writing done by men; or central when applied to their interactions with women. Sex, for the wife, has always been part of the job, on the list. The other parts are cleaning, mothering (child and husband), listening, shopping, finding houses, moving, packing, ordering every other life with which she is intimate. Yet Jane, this wife, is also an artist, a poet, a creative and brilliant woman who wins rare international prizes, and instinctively, protectingly conceals her pride and delight when telling John, who applies for and never gets famous prizes.
Here is this woman in the 2020s looking after a man who, she realises with a sudden horror, is mediocre in every way. The horror is not in just realising his mediocrity and his inability to be anything but adversarial, but seeing his fury, his envy, his need to bring her brilliance, her achievements, her capabilities down to the mess of his life.
When Jane realises this, she realises what a liar she is - to him, to herself. Perhaps the script we have for relationships can only exist on deceptions? And sentimentalities? If it is too hard being in a relationship without the glossy deceptions contained in that idea called Romance, perhaps it is even harder being deceptionless? But we must try.
Ferrante, the female version of Keats’ stout Cortez on a peak, gazed upon another world and gave it to those who were interested. And here is Manguso. I read Liars with the same exhilaration.
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