“My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told 10 billion times.” It doesn’t matter how familiar a story seems when the writing style is as forthright and forensic as in Liars, Sarah Manguso’s new novel. This retrospective narrative of a 14-year marriage that ends in divorce is the kind of book that can be read in one single furious sitting, as the reader grows ever more incredulous at the learned incompetence and laziness of one half of a relationship that forces the other, better half to keep everything afloat.
The old arguments of every failed marriage are present and accounted for in Liars – money, work, childcare, time, desire – with the added tension that both parties are aspiring artists. When they first get together they promise to support each other in their various endeavours but when one partner gets an acclaimed residency in Italy and the other one doesn’t, the grand illusion of artistic and domestic bliss begins to falter.
I was wondering how far I could get into the review without revealing the gender of either partner but I suspect many readers will have already figured out that Jane is the successful writer half of the marriage – bursaries, publications, shortlisted for major international awards – and her husband, John, a failed artist turned embittered entrepreneur who upends the couple, and later the family when Jane has a son, from east to west coast America every time he comes up with another madcap idea.
The best that can be said of John is that some of these ventures seem to work, at least enough to pay for monthly trips back to his hometown of Calgary, where mysterious investors demand his presence with alarming frequency. Though these trips are only ever referenced in a single staccato sentence, they become through repetition a kind of awful refrain, marking Jane’s powerlessness in the marriage, the sense of menace that infiltrates daily life. Her role in the family becomes that of passive helpmeet, “in charge of everything and in control of nothing”.
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By the book’s inevitable end, we feel as if we know John intimately, his whims, ego and failed ambitions, the fact “he hadn’t cleaned a bathroom in ten years”
Manguso is an American poet and writer whose nine books include the novel Very Cold People, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award, and a work of nonfiction, 300 Arguments. Liars, only her second novel, shows a writer rigorous in detail and image, fully confident in her own pared-back style, which is perfect for documenting the slow destruction of a marriage from within.
The book is written in short, forward-moving episodes that give a propulsive quality to the story, recalling the writing of Jenny Offill, but with an icy undertone of Rachel Cusk or Gwendoline Riley. There are plenty of laughs in Liars, as long as your sense of humour is set firmly to painful irony. It’s one of those books that will make many female readers feel rage at the page; anyone who liked the eviscerating insight of Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor will devour Liars.
“A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that,” says Jane, yet her knowledge is not enough to save her from this fate. Manguso describes the destruction in succinct, vibrant scenes that feel as if they are winnowed from life.
From the delirious beginnings of the relationship – “I tried to understand that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason” – to the messy and protracted unravelling, she never flinches: “John didn’t just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he’d ever done anything wrong. Feeling that he’d done something wrong really threatened his sense of entitlement.”
The portrait of motherhood is equally deft. Manguso documents how its demands can prevent full immersion in art, while also showing Jane’s love and tenderness for her son, referenced throughout as “the child”, a neat encapsulation of the book’s wry tone overall. The three members of this small, struggling family come to life on the page.
By the book’s inevitable end, we feel as if we know John intimately, his whims, ego and failed ambitions, the fact “he hadn’t cleaned a bathroom in ten years”. There is interrogation of the self, too, with a sense of Jane raking through the past to understand her part in the marriage, in the ordeal.
Late in the story she notes of her husband’s behaviour that “inflicting abuse isn’t the hard part. Controlling the narrative is the main job.” Liars has the satisfying feel of a great reclamation, a marriage burnt to the ground, the downtrodden party rising from the ashes.
