Liars by Sarah Manguso review – searing tale of a toxic marriage

A brilliant, imaginative woman; a mediocre man with too high an idea of himself, in need of a woman to destroy. It’s a dynamic that goes back to George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, novels that wreaked havoc with conventional ideas about to whom brilliance is meant to belong and forced the reader to see how grindingly limited these male characters’ assertions of power were compared with the women’s gifts for generosity and self-creation – for life itself.

Now, 150 years on, the allure of masculine power remains a trap that shimmers enticingly at its victims, male and female. The divorce courts continue to be flooded by men who stake everything on success, only to be confronted by the talents of their wives; men who end up punishing and controlling the woman whose proximity becomes a kind of torture. These wives can turn out to be appallingly suited to the self-sacrificing life they are forced into. Affluent heterosexual marriages are so often the sites of secret, insidious abuse and pain.

Sarah Manguso has sought a contemporary novelistic form for such a marriage, in all its dreary horror and simulated tenderness. Manguso is a master of the searing aphoristic insight. Indeed, her book 300 Arguments was a compilation of such aphorisms. “After I stopped hoping to outgrow them, my fears were no longer a burden. Hope is what made them a burden.” Her first novel, Very Cold People , was a brilliantly funny dissection of the everyday experiences of an unhappy childhood that cumulatively spun into a desolating picture of a broken world. She is well placed to home in on a grim marriage.

Jane – clearly and almost dutifully a fictional self-portrait of Manguso – meets charismatic film-maker John Bridges. They set out to construct a creative, equal marriage and apply together for artists’ fellowships, only for Jane to succeed and John to fail. Now the warning signs proliferate: he borrows money, “trash talks” James Joyce when depressed, accuses her of craziness during arguments and is way too interested in her having been briefly sectioned as a young woman. Yet they marry – he’s handsome and brilliant, after all – and conceive a child, and he finds investors to back a film production company that requires them to uproot to California.

He borrows money, ‘trash talks’ James Joyce when depressed, accuses her of craziness during arguments

The novel documents the steady decline of the next decade. When his company fails, John starts again, coming up with the comically appalling idea of inventing an internet-accessing mirror. They move house repeatedly, and he keeps thwarting her career – when she’s due to travel for work, he gets hospitalised, paralytically drunk. Happiness for Jane becomes merely “the temporary cessation of pain”. Motherhood gets her through; her “animal intimacy” with her son is “the best part” of her life, turning her from a person into the sky he looks up into whenever he needs comfort. But motherhood is part of the trap, because she now can’t leave; she and her son are dependent on John’s income, and her decade-long subservience has left her weak and ill with an autoimmune condition that was previously in remission.

Liars is a compulsive, claustrophobic book to read, but it’s also curiously thin, starved of oxygen in the way that Jane herself is. The years, as they amass, are necessarily repetitive. Jane marks this by writing brief summaries of her life, year after year. “I only ever served as an adjunct professor while we made five long-distance moves in less than seven years to support his career.” Manguso is writing a character who increasingly lacks agency, and the more of a victim Jane becomes, the more two-dimensional she and John end up being.

In the last stage of the book, when they finally move towards divorce, redemption comes through the next stage of motherhood: her son is eight or nine now, and the two share insights about the world and specifically about John. I worry a little that motherhood so often has to do the work of redemption in feminist divorce novels; there’s a danger that it leads to idealised depictions of this bond and denies the hard-won ambivalence that generations of feminists have claimed. But I also know it to be true, as Adrienne Rich long ago pointed out, that motherhood away from the structure of the nuclear family offers freedoms and possibilities that motherhood as patriarchal institution can occlude.

What I like best here is the way that Manguso gives the boy himself agency. “I don’t think it’s a lie when Dad says the divorce is what’s best for our family because that’s just what he thinks,” he decides carefully. The title suggests that Jane may also be a liar, and there’s a kind of freedom, too, in this. Those miniature stories of victimhood aren’t the only stories she can tell about herself.

There’s a sense in the final stages that Manguso is pulling away from herself as an aphorist, and pushing towards a richer, wider mimetic vision. Life has supplied her with material that makes this hard; this marriage is so appallingly, predictably narrow. But by the end, marriage itself ceases to interest her. The book suddenly expands, offering other stories, glimpsed off the page, proffering the gift of another kind of world, as the novel always has.

• Liars by Sarah Manguso is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.