Liars by Sarah Manguso: book review
Thank you to Hogarth for the advanced copy of the book for review purposes. My thoughts are all my own.
Overview: Jane had ideas about her life. She was going to be a successful artist married to a successful artist. She would be a wife but subvert the subjugation that typically comes with the title. She would do the same as a mother. But, of course, she couldn't. Her husband's jealousy and prioritizing of his own needs drown out her career opportunities. She was left with all the household chores and admin tasks. She was a caregiver alone even when married. Becoming the perfect wife was unfulfilling and still not enough to have the marriage she envisioned. Charting her entire relationship, we see Jane experience life from children to health scares to the COVID pandemic. Overall: 2.5
Characters: 2 Here's the thing, fiction and nonfiction are two different categories for a reason. Real life can make a fascinating story, but largely, it needs to be altered and remolded in order to make a captivating story. This book fails in replacing novelization with a transcription of real life without the depth or insight that makes a story compelling. Jane starts out as an artist with ideals. She falls in love with John, and they decide they'll have a different kind of marriage. But, quickly, he starts treating her like a mix of a housekeeper and a personal assistant. This isn't what she wants, but she sacrifices herself to meet his needs. She chooses to have a child with him. She stays with him as they move back and forth across the country at his whim, making it impossible for her to maintain a teaching job or take career opportunities beyond writing her books. He hardly cares for her when she goes through cancer treatment, and he's incompetent at caring for their son. Still, Jane makes his life run and stays married to him and wants to be married to him. I'd call this unrealistic except it's a story I've seen play out over and over again. John is a cartoon villain of a character. He has zero redeeming value and only exists to belittle, demean, and bleed Jane dry while contributing nothing to the household. I would say he's a stereotypical upper middle class husband, and this is an instance of stereotypes deriving from a certain kind of truth. I want to call John an unrealistic character because there is nothing compelling about him; there is no reason Jane should stay with him. I cannot find a shred of love there. But Jane is a certain amount financially dependent and deeply entrenched in an idea of what she "should" do.
This book doesn't depict all marriages, but it is a fairly accurate reflection of a good number of them for a certain demographic of people. And because of that, they don't make very compelling characters. Jane doesn't leave John for a swirl of realistic factors and also the indescribable reason why people don't leave bad marriages every day. John is a horrible person because society allows him to be, encourages him to be. I've watched this kind of a dynamic happen, and if I'm going to read about it in a book, I want the writer to go beneath the surface. To give the husband some kind of dimension that allows me to understand why he was attractive in the first place. To get into the depths of the wife's feelings beyond "being treated like less than a person makes me angry". None of these points are real revelations, and Manguso doesn't render these familiar characters in a new light or in other dimensions that offers something interesting. It's just a sad, everyday horror movie.
Plot: 2 Most of this book is mundane marital disputes and John treating Jane horribly and Jane just sucking it up. The book also violates another novel writing tenant that I now believe more firmly in. Books where characters have no agency and take no agency are harder to become invested in. Everything in this novel happens to Jane. One thing after another after another. It's a nonstop parade of doom and gloom, and it's recounted in a fashion where I just kept waiting for the story to begin. Even in a story with a protagonist who feels as restricted as Jane, her inner life could have some form of choice or resistance. But there's nothing but a plain, nearly emotionless recounting of events—barring sentences that amounted to "I was angry all the time". Without dialogue or scene, it never feels like the plot begins. It feels like a summary trying to prepare you for a story that never comes.
Writing: 2 It's the writing the truly did this book in. The entire novel is written in summary. There is no dialogue. There are no scenes. So much of the book is: (this is my summarization, not actual quotes from the book) "John said we had to move across the country for his job. I didn't want to move. We moved." There's almost no interiority despite being written in the first person, and like I said earlier, everything just happens to Jane. I don't really understand the point of a novel told entirely in summary, all telling, no showing. Especially in a narrative as familiar as this one. Manguso renders a very accurate portrait of a certain, common kind of marriage, but it makes for an extremely frustrating narrative. And the chosen style renders it entirely lifeless when there could've been a deep, thoughtful exploration of what it feels like to be in that situation. I felt as much like an outside observer reading this book as I do in situations I've witnessed in my real life. I never got inside Jane's head. Also, this is a random pet peeve, but there were a number of times that Jane announces that she "felt herself ovulate" or like felt the egg move inside her, and I had to double check that the book was actually written by a woman.
Clearly, this book is for someone that is not me. I was very hopeful based on the synopsis, but I was left feeling like I wanted to throw the book across the room for most of the reading experience.
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