Liars by Sarah Manguso

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Sarah Manguso - Liars

If you thought Rachel Cusk’s divorce book, Aftermath - which I admired in my review for its unflinching honesty: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/aftermath-on-marriage-and-separation-by-rachel-cusk-7554008.html - was brutal, then Liars will shock you. Sarah Manguso’s tenth book is an excoriating, thinly fictionalised account of her marriage. And it does not hold its punches.

Written in her characteristic style of paragraphs without chapters, it is as compelling and addictive as reading the no-holds-barred diary of a relative. And yet, powerful as it is, it raises more questions than it answers.

The title alludes to the fictionalised version of Manguso’s husband, known here as John, but it also applies to her version of herself, Jane. John is a liar in the bad sense - he ends up betraying Jane before leaving her and their son. Jane, we are led to believe, is a liar because she repeatedly views her marriage through rose-tinted glasses, despite the devastating evidence to the contrary. So she is lying to herself; putting on a facade of being happily married, although almost every page lists John’s acts of selfishness, insensitivity, and uselessness as a husband and father.

It is obvious that Jane married a man-baby. John is a handsome but unsuccessful artist. During the course of their marriage, he embarks on a series of jobs as a joint founder of various companies, small roles in the film world, and then as an employee in other people’s firms. Reading between the lines, it seems that Jane marries him for his looks, his sense of humour,  the fact that they have great sex together.

But none of these traits are enough to sustain a marriage, especially when a child is born. And in fact, the sex dwindles to the point where Jane humiliatingly has to demand it - and we all know that pressurising a partner with their obligations is not conducive to a happy sex or love life.

John is over-confident as well as under-qualified. He also doesn’t take failure well. When she meets him, John tells Jane he is applying for a writers’ residency in Greece and encourages Jane to apply too. Jane wins a coveted place, John doesn’t. Many of the winners turn up with a partner, but at the opening meeting, all the other partners sit in chairs next to the wall while the winners take seats at the table next to their individual piles of introductory material. But John insists on sitting with Jane at the table. Such objective evidence of John’s arrogance backs the veracity of Jane’s claims about his self-centred nature. There is no doubt that she has married an insensitive buffoon.

The stress on Jane of John’s inadequacy as a husband and father is exacerbated by his constant insistence that they have to move, for him to replace one well-paid job from which he has been sacked with another. How John manages to procure quite so many highly remunerated jobs when he seems to lack qualifications, attention to detail, or diligence remains a mystery - it may well be the known power of good looks and confidence and their ability to attract employers and funding - but Jane’s listing of John’s carelessness seem to be accurate given that he is sacked more than once.

The constant moves - they travel from Manhattan to Los Angeles, and then skip between LA and San Francisco a few times - mean it is difficult for writer Jane to maintain any permanent teaching job or good childcare in order to have time to write. It also isolates her, although thankfully she does have good friends she stays in touch with.

So it seems John is a man-baby - a guy whose looks and charm have always lubricated his passage through life without the need for talent, ideas, or endeavour.

But the reader starts to have doubts about Jane’s version of events - and there is no intention here to paint her as an unreliable narrator. Manguso presents her alter-ego as the stalwart who does all the housework and childcare and who has to deal with a selfish and lazy slacker of a husband who ends up betraying her. But then we look at Jane’s representation of other people, and she doesn’t come across as the depicted caring and lovely person driven to impotent rage. For example, she is horribly judgemental of John’s dying mother:

‘For Christmas we gave her herbal tea, almonds, and artisanal cooking salt.

She left the gifts on the kitchen counter and ate blocks of grocery-store cheese, cookies, cake, and cinnamon rolls spread with half an inch of butter…

Christmas dinner was at a restaurant draped in polyester napkins, all the food sprinkled with powdered cheese, chocolate syrup drizzled on the dessert plates.’

Jane is similarly sneery about her own parents. They visit after the birth of Jane and John’s baby:

‘My parents came to meet the baby. My mother was holding an obviously secondhand oversized teddy bear with a rumpled $50 price tag on it. My father hugged me. My mother didn't seem to know how to hold the infant and didn't think to wash her hands until I told her to. She said that a stranger had stayed in my parents' house until I was four weeks old, taking care of me day and night. I hadn't known that.’

And:

‘My parents sat in the apartment watching me change diapers and feed and soothe the baby. When I suggested they could run to the laundromat, my mother said, We can drop off the stuff and you can pick it up later. I said, That isn't actually helpful.’

Jane is similarly uncharitable about others. When a stranger she meets at a party responds to Jane by showing sympathy, it is not interpreted as the empathy it is:

‘At a party, while answering my question about her own marital troubles, a woman cut herself off by saying But you've been through so much. Suddenly she needed me to have suffered more.’

Really? This has happened to me - not in terms of sympathy for my marriage, because I have a very happy one - which I know is largely down to good luck. But it frequently occurs when discussing health, when friends or strangers demur that I have had a tougher time than them. I take it as the kindness it is.

At other times, Jane erupts at relatively minor incidents - when John decides to go out when they had previously agreed to do yoga together. And Jane sometimes expects a lot of him - when she is worried about her narrow stools and sees a gastroenterologist, she doesn’t ask him to do a rectal examination - she waits until she is home, then later asks John to do so - which he does, and even with good humour.

But John’s laziness in domestic matters seems evident and it seems that Jane’s suffering leads to a rage not only against John - which is well documented here - but against the world. That this is Manguso’s character rather than an idiosyncrasy of the fictional Jane is suggested by the fact that in her memoir about her auto immune disease, The Two Kinds of Decay, which I reviewed here: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-two-kinds-of-decay-by-sarah-manguso-2198239.html , Manguso’s suicidal ideation presented as an urge to drive the wrong way down a busy road. This caused me significant disquiet. As a fellow sufferer of auto immune disease (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, scleroderma, anti-phospholipid syndrome), I’ve had some bad times, and a long time ago, after breaking up with my first long-term boyfriend, I felt suicidal, but my own fleeting plan for suicide was to bring home a syringe pump and put myself into a forever sleep with an anaesthetic. I lived alone at the time. The act would have minimal impact on others.

I never seriously planned it, it was a thought that crept stealthily into my mind and was banished almost immediately. But I can’t get my head around those who would willingly kill others in their own suicide.

But this is not intended to be a character assassination. Manguso is a talented writer and this is raw, painful stuff. And she is not alone in falling for the wrong person - most of us have at some stage - her misfortune is marrying them. And many of us lash out when we are miserable; albeit in smaller ways. But Jane seems blind to the fact that she, too, has flaws. And she is not presented as a character impervious to her faults. As far as Manguso and Jane are concerned, Jane was naive to marry John; she was a fool to put up with him so long; she tried to convince herself that their marriage was fine; she responds with rage to John’s lax attitudes and profligacy. She is put upon, she is a martyr. She speaks out for generations of women who have been expected to deal thanklessly with dull household chores, repeated daily, and with the vicissitudes of bringing up small children. She feels guilty for having previously overlooked their plight.

Interestingly, other heroines in the book are not named. ‘Third babysitter’, who is kind, good with the child, and goes over and beyond in her helpfulness and sweetness, doesn’t deserve a name. Yes, it would be a fictional name, but it would still confer some kudos, some brief acknowledgement. Perhaps it would give her permanence; an identity, and detract from Jane being the hard working, child-nurturing star at the heart of the book.

John is described in the book as a perpetrator of domestic abuse, even though the only time he slaps Jane is after she slaps him first. Yes, abuse can be emotional too, but there is a danger of belittling domestic abuse by labelling all hopeless, insensitive, unfaithful husbands as domestic abusers. In the acknowledgements,  Manguso name-checks a domestic abuse group with whom she has been very involved since her divorce. There is no doubt that ‘Jane’ had a terrible time in her marriage to this entitled lunk. But you give something the worst label possible, it doesn’t leave you anywhere to go if you ever experience worse. Which I very much hope she doesn’t.