Book Review: ‘Liars,’ by Sarah Manguso - The New York Times

Fiction

The aggrieved wife who narrates Sarah Manguso’s novel “Liars” may or may not be a reliable source about her monster of a husband.

By Brian Dillon

Brian Dillon is the author, most recently, of “Affinities: On Art and Fascination.” He is working on “Ambivalence,” a memoir about aesthetic education.

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

LIARS, by Sarah Manguso

The cardinal mystery in Sarah Manguso’s second novel (she has also published several books of poetry, short stories and nonfiction) goes unplumbed until halfway through, when a neighbor is aghast at the narrator’s marital predicament: “Why are you still with him?”

Jane, a writer with a teaching job, has been following her husband, John, back and forth across the United States while he parlays his failing art career into a lucrative one in film production. Now she barely writes, struggles to find academic work, spends her days caring for their son and coping with the fallout of John’s chaotic habits and wild ego. “He was the main character, and I was his wife. His mother had also been a wife. Wives and more wives, all the way down.”

And yet Jane stays, because she believes a certain narrative: Theirs is a happy marriage, a happy family. “Liars” is an unflagging and acridly funny assault on that story, but also a formally canny study of how such tales get told — and how fragile our replacements may turn out.

What class of monster is John? Let me count his grisly ways. There are the dominating facts of his adultery, his definitive abandonment of Jane and the industrious untruth that goes with such ventures. But long before the end of their marriage he has been an exhausting object choice. He borrows $8,000 from Jane to make a movie and doesn’t pay it back; as his fortunes expand, he mocks her for not making enough money; he criticizes one of her books in company, saying she should have followed his advice about its structure; he tells people about her time in a psychiatric ward; he blames her for his own depression; he throws up his hands at tiny disappointments (the life model at his drawing class is a man!) and lounges about playing video games; he wants to know why his wife is so much angrier than other women.

Then there are the faults that would vex only a writer. Visiting Jane at her artist residency in Greece — she won a spot, he didn’t — John tries to impress the lunch table by bad-mouthing James Joyce. Worse: “I noticed that he used the word phenomena as a singular noun.”

In other words John is very much his own creep, but also quite generic. His misdeeds range from the psychically devastating — without him Jane imagines herself not in the arms of a loving partner, but “dying alone, cradled by the universe” — to the seemingly trivial: He holds the baby wrong and throws his back out, he impulse-buys $40 worth of scallops. Beyond his physical attractiveness, he appears not to have a single redeeming feature.

That is to say, John is both a convincing stand-in for large and small aspects of patriarchy, and a pure artifact of Jane’s rage, a caricature from which much of the novel’s exasperated comedy derives — “Why are you still with him?” It is possible, Manguso’s broader narrative drift seems to suggest, to come back from this rage (and disbelief at one’s credulousness) to rescue much from life and art. But the litany — telling the marriage as one worries a rosary — remains, a weight of mundane fact that follows Jane around.

As the title alerts us, there is more than one liar in this novel. How much should we trust Jane’s monologue, her she-said-she-said control of the narrative? It is not so much that Manguso’s narrator is merely unreliable, hiding her own spousal failings and misrepresenting a more innocent or hapless John. Rather, “Liars” is interested in all the levels of storytelling that make up a marriage, that invent or bolster the idea of marriage in the first place, even for a smart and skeptical woman like Jane. Nobody is not a narrator in this setup; they are all spinning competing tales.

Manguso, whose previous books have explored the laconic form of the aphorism and repurposed her own diaries, here moves between fragmented and staccato registers — one brute fact after another — and interludes where Jane tries to write and rewrite a condensed version of her story in medias res, hoping to enliven the uniform font of her married life with italicized clarity. You could read “Liars” purely as an experiment in combining competing styles and narratives into one story — and that’s also what a marriage is.

When Jane and John are first together, marriage seems fantastical: “I’m a real wife, I thought, setting the table with cloth napkins. It felt like a parlor game.” Naiveté, disbelief or playful and ironic distance? It makes no difference; quite soon Jane “floated face down in housewifery.”

A condition, like the rest of her relationship, that involves infinitely subtler modes of narration, whether solace for her self-pitying husband or self-consolation in her moments of doubt about the whole enterprise. A question the novel will not easily answer: How to know when you are telling stories to those you love, let alone to yourself?

LIARS | By Sarah Manguso | Hogarth | 256 pp. | $28