30 The New York Reviewtoy, she thinks, “My own girlhood felt
like something from 1650 even when it
was happening.... I spent those days
feeling half- there, not quite committed
to that life.” Only a few pages earlier,
Ruth is playing in the garden of the
local library, digging up earthworms
and chasing beetles. She mistakes a pile
of dog shit for dirt and plunges her hand
into the “soft wet mound.” How is a
child who is this ingenuous also articu-
late enough to express such a profound
divorce from her own sense of being?In elementary school, Ruth befriends
a trio of girls—Amber, Bee, and Char-
lie. Their families fall at varying points
on the economic spectrum: Amber’s
father is a mechanic, Bee’s works in
construction, and Charlie’s family is
wealthy enough to have a housekeeper.
Ruth remarks on Amber’s worn clothes,
poor teeth, and free school lunches but
also notes that they are both able to
live across town from the kids of the
Bannon Road projects, the lowest rung
on the socioeconomic ladder. Later,
Ruth learns from Charlie that even the
Brahmins sort themselves according to
worth, sifting out their poorer relations
into lesser- thans.
Manguso’s descriptions of girlhood
make for some of the novel’s best
moments. The lead- up to puberty is
adorned with friendship pins, heart-
shaped stickers, and scented pencils:
“Everything smelled like strawber-
ries then—stickers, lip gloss, hair.”
The girls’ easy familiarity, soon to
be lost, begets an intimacy that Man-
guso voices collectively: “We were still
young enough that our physical bound-aries were permeable; we braided each
other’s hair and knew the scents of
each other’s scalps.” Manguso is won-
derful at the slow fade of this blissful
innocence, the way it is supplanted by
dangers that infiltrate at the fringes of
awareness:Amber’s niece went to school with
us for part of that year. When she
introduced herself to Bee she said,
I’m still thirteen. I know, I don’t
look it, and the way she said it told
us that she’d heard it so many times
from so many men that it seemed
as deeply a part of her as her own
name. I remember there were
so many horse chestnuts on the
ground when she said it.As the girls age into middle school,
then high school, their different stand-
ings in this social order become more
pronounced, and they drift apart.
Ruth’s family moves to a better part of
town, into a house formerly owned by
Winifred Cabot Fish, a member of the
storied Cabot family. “The house was
cheap,” Ruth explains, “maybe because
Winifred had died in it, and the family
had wanted to off- load it quickly.”
In the attic, Ruth finds old pho-
tographic negatives of a man and a
woman: “In one shot, they stand in
tight embrace. It could have been Win-
ifred and her husband, or it could have
been her parents, or it could have been
anyone.” The possibility inherent in
these negatives is freeing to Ruth, and
she begins to imagine, almost greedily,
the various routes Winifred’s private
life might have taken. The restraint
that characterizes not only Ruth butthe novel in general dissipates here. She
becomes obsessed with Winifred—
wondering if she might find strands
of the woman’s hair in the house and
thinking about how Winifred would
use the sleeping porch during hot sum-
mer nights and walk along the brook in
all kinds of weather. “I imagined her
so completely that she became real,”
Ruth says. Her fascination vitalizes the
narrative, and the projection of Ruth’s
fantasies onto another woman provides
the most generous account of her inner
yearnings.
Along with the negatives, Ruth dis-
covers a pile of possibly bloodied cloth-
ing, which elicits a tangle of visions
about enduring love, freedom, and sex-
ual desire. Were the clothes Winifred’s
memento mori of her love for her hus-
band after his death? Or had she killed
him so that she could be alone, free
perhaps to pursue an unconsummated
affair with the neighboring Lowell
boy? “I wanted to believe that Win-
ifred was a murderess because I wanted
to have such power myself someday,”
Ruth thinks. Her fantasy of murder is
a desire for self- determination, and she
keeps the details of this desire secret,
“so that no one could contradict them
and take them away.”One summer afternoon, Ruth’s
mother sprays her with the garden
hose. “I laughed so hard I thought I
might burst,” Ruth recalls.Many times after that I asked my
mother to spray me with the hose
again, but she always said no.... I
thought that maybe it was wrong to
be that loudly happy, and that she
was trying to protect me.On the next page, walking home from
elementary school on a winter after-
noon, Ruth slips on the ice and is in-
jured, but her mother refuses to come
pick her up: “She screamed at me and
said that she had never gotten a ride
home from school.” In the next para-
graph, her mother buys Ruth a fancy
slip for her birthday party, then helps
her young guests make construction-
paper crowns.
Ruth’s childhood is punctuated
by the contradictory behavior of her
mother, an overweight Jewish woman
who can’t forget the slights dealt her
by her rich Catholic Italian in- laws
and who feels patronized by her own
wealthy family members even as she
tries to curry favor with them. “She
wasn’t classy like Aunt Rose or Uncle
Roger,” Ruth says of her mother’s rel-
atives, “but she wasn’t poor enough to
be called poor. I carefully remembered
all the names and how sophisticated all
of them were, in descending order.”
According to Ruth, her mother thinks
of herself as “the protagonist of every-
thing.” She spies on people making
out in cars, pointing them out to Ruth,
and masturbates at the movie theater
and while watching TV with her family,
“making little sticky sounds with her
mouth.” She sexualizes her daughter,
too, begging her to wear a bikini instead
of a one- piece swimsuit and respond-
ing approvingly when a cashier openly
ogles Ruth’s body. Ruth guesses that
her mother wants her to seem “already
grown up,” though it’s unclear why.
A few pages earlier, Ruth is babysit-
ting two boys. She spanks them after
they barge in on her in the bathroom,and later soothes one who gets a nose-
bleed—she can’t locate herself on the
spectrum of punisher and comforter
and asks, “If I wasn’t their mother, was
I my mother?” This cryptic line seems
to suggest the process of becoming re-
sponsible for oneself, and it reminded
me of a similar sentence from Kate
Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011), a novel
about another girl named Ruth and the
fog of young womanhood. “Perhaps
without a mother one can no longer be
young,” Zambreno’s Ruth thinks. Both
observations circle not only the thorny
relationship of mothers and daughters
but also the process of a girl becoming
the primary subject of her own story.
When, about halfway through Ver y
Cold People, an eleven- year- old Ruth
thinks of herself as a child “whose ca-
pacity to receive love had been dimin-
ished,” I thought of Manguso’s concept
of “extreme love,” from her 2015 essay
on motherhood. Looking back on her
pre-motherhood self, she wrote:It seems obvious to me that my
refusal to have a child was a way
to avoid the challenges of extreme
love, to avoid participating in dis-
mantling the stereotypes that had
brainwashed me.The meaning of “extreme love” is
fuzzy—is it a measure of trust or commit-
ment, or that you’re willing to die for an-
other person?—but two of its results, in
Manguso’s conception, are a disposition
“often mischaracterized as selflessness”
(she describes the feeling of needing to
care for her son as “an itch, an urge”) and
a more developed sense of humanity. Not
only that, but by “weathering trauma,
practicing patience, being seasoned by
love,” she has become, she says, a better
writer and resolves to celebrate these
newfound qualities in literature:I want to read books that were
written in desperation, by people
who are disturbed and overtaxed,
who balance on the extreme edge
of experience. I want to read books
by people who are acutely aware
that death is coming and that abid-
ing love is our last resort. And I
want to write those books.How does motherhood constitute
“the extreme edge of experience”? The
only answer I can find in Manguso’s
essay is that motherhood requires self-
effacement, perhaps total. “The point
of having a child is to be rent asunder,
torn in two,” she writes. “It is a shat-
tering, a disintegration of the self, after
which the original form is quite gone.
Still, it is a breakage that we are, as a
species if not as individuals, meant to
survive.”
Men appear in Ver y Cold People
as fathers, uncles, brothers, teachers,
classmates, doctors, and police officers,
but their actions are largely suspect, re-
gardless of their roles:We’d been told that Officer Hill
was an odd person. Sensitive. We
thought that the tennis coach was
odd, the volleyball coach was odd,
Bee’s father was odd, Amber’s
brother was a little odd...Ruth’s father, an accountant, makes far
fewer appearances than her mother,
though he is no less perplexing and
harmful. A scornful shadow, he
screams, crows, sneers, and rages atCALL FOR NOMINATIONS
THE 2023 HOLBERG PRIZE
Deadline: 15 June, 2022
The Holberg Prize is an international prize awarded
annually for outstanding contributions to research in the
humanities, social sciences, law and theology. The Prize
is worth NOK 6,000,000 (approx. USD 670,000).THE 2022 HOLBERG LAUREATE
SHEILA JASANOFF
U.S. scholar Sheila
Jasanoff is awarded the
2022 Holberg Prize for
her pioneering research
in the field of science
and technology studies.Photo: Martha StewartTo nominate, go to holbergprize.org
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