28 The New York Review‘I Needed to Stay Approximate’
Nicole RudickVery Cold People
by Sarah Manguso.
Hogarth, 191 pp., $26.00Reviewers of Sarah Mangu-
so’s writing love to tally her
words and pages—as is often
the case for very short books
(the “slim volume”) and very
long ones (the “doorstop”),
as though such extremes are
feats beyond belief. Her work
falls into the former category:
books “brief as a breath” and
“slim as a Pop- Tart,” written in
a style that has been described
as “fragmentary” and “apho-
ristic” (terms Manguso her-
self has disavowed), “with the
precision of a miniaturist.” It is
difficult to do a lot with a little,
and Manguso, a poet as well as
an essayist and memoirist, cov-
ers quite a bit of distance with
a minimum of means.
Manguso’s prose is an un-
common mix of economy and
obsession. Her first memoir,
The Two Kinds of Decay (2008),
distills a decade of intense
treatments for chronic idio-
pathic demyelinating poly-
radiculoneuropathy, a rare
auto immune disorder, into
brief, forthright chapters that
intimately illuminate the toll of
chronic illness. In The Guard-
ians (2012), she examines,
through a series of vignettes,
her friend Harris’s suicide, in
order to give shape to her grief.
Ongoingness (2015) remarks on the
voluminousness of Manguso’s diaries
in fewer than a hundred pages; looking
askance at the diaries’ 800,000 words,
she admits to the impossibility of com-
prehending the passage of time. Ongo-
ingness incorporates nearly as much
white space as text, a formal structure
that mirrors Manguso’s observations:I’d write about a few moments, but
the surrounding time—there was
so much of it! So much apparent
nothing I ignored, that I treated as
empty time between the memora-
ble moments.She deepens her use of white space in
300 Arguments (2017)—a disjointed
autobiographical meditation on big
subjects such as ambition, beauty, time,
depression, and failure—gathering
into discrete entries of usually one or
two sentences the quotable lines of an
imaginary book, with all else excised.
Despite Manguso’s often fraught
subjects, there is pleasure in following
the path she cuts, particularly in The
Guardians, in which the facts of what
happened are intensified as her lan-
guage becomes more abstract. When
she thinks about her friend losing his
life and identity at the instant of his sui-
cide, the transition reads like a reverse
miracle:Harris met the train with his body,
offered it his body.
The train drove into his body. It
drove against his body.
It sent him from his body.
The conductor went down ontothe track and touched the body
and lifted and carried the body.
There was no need for a doctor.
The body was removed from the
track and rested for two days with-
out its name.She tends to express thoughts as state-
ments or assertions, and this gives her
writing a feeling of tight certainty,
sometimes even arrogance. Later in
The Guardians, as she has a drink at a
bar, she observes a man enter, swallow
a shot without sitting down, and depart.
Her assessment is instant yet specula-
tive: “You know it’s a good bar when it
attracts alcoholics with that level of fa-
miliarity.” In 300 Arguments she asks,
“Am I happy? Damned if I know, but
give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you
whether you are.”
At times it seems as though Man-
guso’s linguistic constraints are a way
of keeping a firm rein on the poten-
tial sprawl of the ideas her words illu-
minate, as if fewer words mean fewer
opportunities for meaning to get out
of control. “I always believed that the
point of writing for an audience was to
rescue the suicidal and to console the
dying,” she wrote in a 2015 essay about
motherhood.^1 There isn’t much room
for fallibility in that formulation.Manguso’s first novel, Ver y Cold Peo -
ple, stays true to her style: in less than
two hundred pages, it favors incident
and mood over linear storytelling, witheach individual paragraph surrounded
by white space. Set mainly in the 1980s,
it is an unsettled coming- of- age story
narrated by a girl named Ruth, who
lives in a kind of stasis, growing and
maturing in an atmosphere of little
warmth or nurturing. “I needed to
stay approximate,” Ruth says. “No one
could know what I cared about.” Her
crucial relationships—with her parents
and her female friends—surround her
like the rings of electrons orbiting the
nucleus of an atom, altering her but re-
maining apart.
Ruth is born in Waitsfield, a fictional
small town on the outskirts of Boston
and a place, we learn in the novel’s open-
ing lines, to which her family doesn’t
belong. For Ruth, an only child, it isn’t
just that her parents are of a lower class
than Waitsfield’s moneyed elite—“the
first, best people,” such as Cabots and
Lodges, whose three- hundred- year- old
houses quietly boast the “historically
correct paint color.” It’s that they are
illegitimate, pretenders who scavenge
at the dump and garage sales for cast-
offs from their affluent neighbors. Her
mother snips wedding announcements
from the newspaper and affixes them
to the refrigerator, as though the brides
and grooms, who “sat on the boards of
libraries and museums,” were friends
of the family. Though Ruth can discern
the superficiality in her parents’ behav-
ior and in the community at large—she
notices the sticky, fake snow sprayed
on a lawn in spring for an ad shoot and
recognizes the difference between the
oldest houses and the newer, more ex-
pensive ones—she, too, falls for this
perceived importance, “swoon[ing]over the girls and boys at
school with names like Verity
and Cornelius.”
Ruth sees that other kids
wear the same shoes and ex-
pensive windbreakers as one
another, and she envies “their
clannish sameness.” She must
make do with factory- second
clothing and a Tropicana Or-
ange Juice imitation of a Swatch
watch. Her mother shops for
groceries at the gas station and
buys overripe produce picked
from the “used food” sec-
tion of the health- food store.
Ruth enumerates these expe-
riences without commentary,
sometimes dissociated from
the narrative. When she says,
“Creditors called all day and
into the evening. I had to pick
up the phone and say that I was
home alone,” the information is
delivered in its own paragraph,
without elaboration. Such lines
recall the arrangement of 300
Arguments, as well as some
of that book’s less successful
entries: “I keep some desires
unfulfilled for fear of losing all
desire, but sometimes I need a
break from them anyway.”
Manguso’s language can be
exquisitely spartan and laconic.
She describes the “soft fuh” of
falling snow and how the light
of a winter morning “spread
like a watery broth over the
landscape.” A synesthetic pas-
sage near the start of the novel
is as florid as she gets:Autumn brought with it the slap-
clatter of crows, fire smells, leafy
sweet- rot. New corduroys, cold air,
brown paper grocery bags folded
over schoolbooks. Writing on the
first pages of notebooks, Septem-
ber 7. September 8. September 9,
never sure how my handwriting
should look.Manguso captures the bewilderment of
childhood in Ruth’s flat observations
about situations she doesn’t fully un-
derstand, supplemented by feral imag-
inings. When a friend suggests miming
sex between Ken and Barbie, Ruth
wonders, “Would Ken lie stacked on
top of Barbie, or would their only point
of contact be their crotches as they bal-
anced like acrobats?”
The novel is composed in the simple
past tense, which creates the impres-
sion that Ruth is narrating her story as
she moves through adolescence. After
riding her bike up a hill and back down
again, she concludes, “I knew that chil-
dren were supposed to ride bikes for
fun, and I dutifully played the part of a
child having fun.” Some passages beg-
gar belief, and seem calculated for an
effect whose significance I can’t quite
detect. It isn’t until the book’s very last
paragraph that Ruth reveals that de-
cades have passed, and she’s telling the
story “some years into raising a child of
my own.” This collapse of time often
gives her childhood self a knowing-
ness that is disproportionate to her age.
When she is still young enough to be
thrilled by the gift of a new Lite- BriteSarah Manguso; illustration by Harriet Lee-Merrion(^1) “The Grand Shattering,” Harper’s,
August 2015.
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