Publishers Weekly
★ 06/10/2024
The second novel from essayist and poet Manguso (after Very Cold People) paints an excoriating portrait of a marriage. In brisk prose, Manguso tells the story of John and Jane, who meet as emerging artists and discover, over the course of their 14-year union, just how “adversarial” a marriage can become. Jane, who narrates, is a writer deeply committed to her craft. While working on a book-length poem, she meets John, a multidisciplinary artist, and she’s relieved to find a kindred spirit, someone “for whom making art was central and being in a relationship was incidental.” But after getting married and becoming parents, Jane realizes John is “the main character” and she’s “his wife.” Consequently, she “floated face down in housewifery,” cooking, cleaning, and taking charge of moving the family from New York City to Los Angeles after John launches a film production company there, then back to New York after the company fires him. When John eventually leaves her, she fantasizes “about shitting in my hand and smearing... the shit into the backs of all his paintings.” Manguso’s barbed sentences push the plot forward at a brisk pace. The author is at the top of her game. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)
From the Publisher
I have long been a fan of Sarah Manguso’s crystalline prose. . . . A furious, propulsive meditation on wifehood, motherhood and artistic ambition.”—NPR
“[A] painful and beautifully wrought story of a relationship . . . Manguso is a poet-novelist who knows brevity can whittle the sharpest knife.”—Vulture
“We know Manguso to be the kind of writer capable of walloping you with an insight when you least expect it, so to have her brain trained on the subject of an unraveling marriage after a baby makes us extremely curious and very very eager to read.”—Romper
“Powerful . . . an unflinchingly true and honest depiction of a marriage turning from gold to dust—the resentments and disappointments that can rot the heart.”—Miranda Cowley Heller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace
“I couldn’t put it down. An astounding feat, spanning a fourteen-year marriage with concision and specificity . . . It sliced all the way through me. So many women will connect with this book.”—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
“A triumph and a revelation . . . Despite its title, this might be the most honest marriage novel I have ever read. Sarah Manguso’s writing is furious, elegant, bitter, tender, frightening, and deeply funny. I loved this book.”—Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
“I read Liars in one breathless, refuse-to-be-interrupted sitting. I was walloped on every page—by the painful familiarity of the story, by the all-at-onceness of the life described in these pages, by the brilliance of Manguso’s storytelling.”—Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“Liars is a crime novel, except the crime is heterosexual marriage. It’s a whodunit and the villain is the patriarchy. . . . A brilliantly paced, gripping novel of love and betrayal.”—Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife
“An exquisitely creepy book about one of our most horrifying institutions: marriage. I quickly devoured it and loved it.”—Myriam Gurba, author of Creep
“From the first page I was spellbound. This book deserves to be read and reread again to fully absorb its primal power and truth.”—Emily Gould, author of Friendship and Perfect Tunes
“Shocking and captivating.”—Julia Phillips, author of Bear and Disappearing Earth
“Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or
“Intimate and fierce, Liars is a portrait of a marriage corroded by creative envy and a searing examination of the cost of literary ambition.”—Isabel Kaplan, author of NSFW: A Novel and the viral online essay ‘My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer’
“An excoriating portrait of a marriage . . . [Manguso] is at the top of her game.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A slow-motion portrait of a collapsing marriage . . . a bracing story of a woman on the verge.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-05-04
A slow-motion portrait of a collapsing marriage.
Jane, the narrator of this piercing second novel by poet-essayist Manguso, is an accomplished writer who’s fallen for John, a visual artist. From the start of their relationship, it’s clear that he has a competitive streak that manifests as jealousy: When Jane wins an esteemed fellowship in Greece that John lost out on, he sulks and judges. In the years that follow, Jane episodically tracks how her life with John tightens (marriage, a child) and then asphyxiates—John is constantly short on cash, perpetually traveling and moving the family for work, absent when it comes to housework, and dismissive of Jane’s ambitions. (Every time she mentions John taking another trip to Calgary, you can feel Jane grit her teeth a little harder.) Given the asymmetrical nature of the relationship, it’s not hard to predict the novel’s eventual arc. But given the title, it’s also easy to wonder how much Jane might be eliding—though, more brutally, the narrative showcases how much self-deception is required to keep a struggling marriage together. Regardless, much like Very Cold People (2022), the novel is driven by tart, brutal sentences. Sometimes Jane is sarcastically furious (“Congratulations! You’re forty years old and completely financially dependent on your husband!”) or vividly resentful (“At supper, I bit down on a shard of glass he’d gotten into the stir-fry”). Most often, though, the tone reflects a kind of bitter self-resentment that an intelligent and self-possessed feminist has been roped into a conventional, sexist gender role. Catching herself defending John, she thinks, “That’s just me projecting a pretty moral onto a story of deliberate harm.”
A bracing story of a woman on the verge.
