Anger drives a work of autofiction that examines a difficult marriage

Sarah Manguso’s “Liars” seethes with rage. With a surgeon’s precision, Manguso performs a painstaking autopsy on the couple’s developing (and increasingly toxic) relationship, chronicling each and every symptom of its pathology. If that sounds like a recipe for a disturbing novel, she’s not wrong.

Manguso is a poet, essayist and novelist who has long explored sensitive topics including mental illness, sexual abuse, misogyny, motherhood and the predatory effects of an autoimmune disorder. In this book she has written a work of autofiction, ostensibly based on her own troubled marriage, which ended in divorce.

Jane is a talented writer on the cusp of success when she meets John, a charming aspiring artist. At John's urging, Jane applies for the same prestigious scholarship he hopes to win, but only Jane is admitted. She feels guilty; John wants to support Jane, but is actually bitter. Shortly after learning of her achievement, Jane tells us that John “went out and didn't call and came home late… said he wasn't coming home.” I went out drinking, A phrase that repelled me. I hated the person John became when he drank.”

“Liars” is narrated entirely by Jane, whose mood and perspective shift from line to line, alternating between rationalizations of why her love for John is justified, followed by declarations of why she must leave him. Her desperation is palpable: “John woke me up at two in the morning and we fought in whispered screams… In the morning he left without telling me where he was going. Treading water, waiting for death… how interesting, the future had disappeared. I wondered what would happen next.”

What happens next is more of the same, but on steroids. Jane and John have a son (referred to throughout the book as “the boy”). Unsurprisingly, Jane puts aside much of her work to care for her son, but still successfully publishes book after book. John, on the other hand, fails to pull off the art openings he’s commissioned, and instead pursues a career as an entrepreneur, which requires frequent travel and a stomach for financial insecurity. Jane stays home, falls deeply in love with the boy, and simultaneously contemplates what her life would be like without marriage and motherhood. Manguso’s musings recall the work of Rachel Cusk and even Virginia Woolf, who also wondered whether a woman could be happy (or even survive) the marriage trap. “I floated face down in housewifery,” Jane muses.

As with Manguso’s previous writing, “Liars” avoids chapter breaks; paragraph breaks are random. Jane’s observations read like those of a diarist, recording each emotion as it arises, while also recording mundane activities, like doing laundry or going to the bathroom.

And yet Jane is an unreliable narrator, always trying to reconcile her husband’s bad behavior with her desire to stay with him. She lies to herself and to the reader, recalling on one page that “John kept interrupting me, telling me my feelings were stupid, blaming me for our fights, walking out of the room in the middle of a conversation and saying it was a reasonable reaction to my folly.” Two pages later, when John returns from a visit to investors, Jane revels in his good fortune: “John came home, and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have such a happy family.”

Anger drives this novel, and yet there are lovely moments, as when Jane marvels at the exquisite tenderness she feels for her son: “The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of my milk into this body… This absolute authority the baby must be convinced of in order to be safe… The honor the mother must give the baby, when the baby is ready to know that her absolute authority was never real.”

So why does Jane stay with John, even after she confesses that he is irresponsible, jealous of her professional success, disdainful of her desire for her to participate in household chores and child-rearing, and continually accuses her of instability? Aside from the sex, which for many years is frequent and intense, Jane cannot give up the dream of a forever partner: “My God, how I loved to think of our long marriage. I loved to think of myself as someone with the capacity for mature love, which I had experienced as self-elimination and processed as achievement.” The “continuity” of it all.

In recent years, it has become common for writers to portray marriage (and motherhood, too) as a mix of joy and horror. There is plenty of horror here, less joy, except that Manguso is a masterful writer of sentences and a brutally honest analyst of the disadvantages women endure.

The inescapable conclusion, however, is Jane's rage, which also makes her Manguso's rage. Perhaps it is that rage that prevents the reader from seeing John as anything other than a scoundrel, lacking nuance or depth. Has Jane deluded herself all along into thinking John is worthy of her devotion? Or is it her sense of betrayal that leads her to see him as a monster?

In the end, we only know that Jane sees liberation in their separation: “I closed my eyes and piled the whole marriage together. It looked like a scene from the demolition of a building… Then I compacted it and the pile contracted… When I was done, it was black as coal and had the density of a collapsed star. I opened my eyes.”

Leigh Haber is a writer, editor, and editorial strategist. She is a former director of Oprah’s Book Club and book editor for O, The Oprah Magazine.