32 The New York ReviewRuth. The best he can muster is drop-
ping her at school forty minutes early
before zipping away in his used road-
ster. Manguso doesn’t let men off the
hook for their actions—which include
sexual abuse—but that reckoning isn’t
a major part of the novel. Her focus
is the way mothers allow shame to
perpetuate.
The argument Manguso seems to be
making is that if Ruth can’t receive love,
it’s because it hasn’t been given to her
by the person most capable of doing so,
her mother. Ruth internalizes each new
humiliation her mother doles out; she
calls that shame “my birthright.” This
argument extends to the book’s other
mothers, including those of Amber,
Bee, and Charlie, with the negligence
stretching back generationally. Ruth
learns that her “mother’s mother hadn’t
wanted to hold her babies and was
sent to a home to get better, and that
when she came back, she was never the
same.” Her aunt Rose tells Ruth that
Roger, Rose’s husband, was separated
from his parents as a child when he was
sent to a sanatorium to recover from
scarlet fever. These tales of familial
fragmentation send Ruth into a panic.
“I thought of all the questions I wanted
to ask Aunt Rose,” she thinks. “What
had happened to my grandmother?
To Roger? To my mother? And what
would happen to me?”
Ruth tells herself that her mother’s
lack of care for her is meant as a form
of protection. When she pretends to
forget the color of Ruth’s eyes or rid-
icules the way her mouth looks with
braces, Ruth reasons that “it was only
because my mother’s love was so much
greater than all the other loves. It was
that much more dangerous, so she had
to love me in secret, absolutely unob-
served by anyone, especially me.” But
this talismanic love doesn’t suffice
to ward off danger, for Ruth or any
girl.In a recent essay on trauma’s “totaliz-
ing identity” in contemporary culture,
Parul Sehgal writes, “Trauma trumps
all other identities, evacuates personal-
ity, remakes it in its own image.”^2 Seh-
gal is describing Hanya Yanagihara’s
novel A Little Life (2015), but the sen-
tence could also characterize the last
stretch of Ver y Cold People. Amber,
Bee, and Charlie are all victims of sex-
ual abuse, and as the predations inten-
sify, Manguso expels each girl from the
narrative, one by one; they move, they
die, they disappear.
I won’t divulge the details, to avoid
giving away too much of the plot—and
in any case the specifics turn out not
to matter so much. She casts not just
Ruth’s friends in the traumatic role but
all of the town’s girls and women, and
the earlier collective of friendship pins
and strawberry lip gloss becomes an in-
discriminate legion of abuse survivors,
voiced no longer in the first person but
in the third:All of these Waitsfield girls to-
gether, with their burdens. Imagine
twenty of them in a room, all day,
thinking about each other. Think-
ing about what was still going to
happen to them. They could see
the future, a little. They so nobly
faced it, patiently waiting.Every girl becomes a victim, as if it
were unavoidable, and they grow up
to be mothers who are complicit in the
perpetuation of that trauma, partly
through their silence:All the girls in town thought they
were unusual, that they were the
only ones, the only weird, un-
lucky little ones. Some of them
died of that bad luck, that termi-
nal uniqueness. Some of them
got pregnant and had babies and
stopped being girls. And after that
happened, those mothers took up
the story they had been told, the
big lie that had almost done them
in, dusted it off and told it to their
sons and daughters as if their lives
depended on it. That was just one
time. It won’t happen to you.Ruth comes to regard her own mother’s
unspoken experience of abuse as nor-
mal, not rare: “It was too common even
to register as a story. It wasn’t even a
story at all.”
Manguso’s evocation of this assem-
blage of women suggests a desire to
share pain, to recognize one another’s
suffering, and perhaps to find a way out,
but by couching it in a tradition of lies
that extends on and on, without resolu-
tion or relief, the trauma seems to erase
any distinction between individuals
and forgoes any recognition of distinct
inner lives, to say nothing of afterlives.
Claims of uniqueness are often used
to help conceal and perpetuate sexual
abuse; relegating girls and women to an
indistinct mass can be equally damag-
ing. Manguso illustrates this paradox,
but she does so at the expense of her
characters, who are dispensed with
when they no longer serve a purpose
and replaced by an anonymous group
of “all the Waitsfield girls.”
The very forms of Manguso’s
books—fragmentary, aphoristic, dis-
crete, or however one chooses to char-
acterize them—resist clear narrative
paths, and in doing so they can invite
new possibilities. However, for Ruth,
whose future we just glimpse at nov-
el’s end, there is only a hint of what it
means to live beyond the damage of her
childhood, and Ver y Cold People stag-
nates—a story of trauma that does not
move beyond its own crisis. I thought
of all the “apparent nothing” between
memorable moments that Manguso
found missing from her diaries. So
much of childhood and adolescence is
lived in that insignificant time, wait-
ing to be able to make one’s own de-
cisions. Throughout the novel, Ruth is
waiting to be in charge of her own life.
She is waiting, as Manguso writes of all
the Waitsfield girls, for her future to
begin. QJ. H. ELLIOTT
(1930–2022)We mourn the death of J. H. Elliott,
a long-standing contributor and friend.(^2) “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,”
The New Yorker, December 27, 2021.
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