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A portrait of a marriage from challenging beginnings to bitterest of ends. Sarah Manguso’s compulsively readable novel was written in a fury when her husband walked out without warning after twenty years together. It centres on Jane who meets and later marries magnetic, handsome John Bridges. Both are aspiring artists, Jane wants to be a writer, John a filmmaker, for a time their creative ambitions seem to unite them until John’s shifting priorities take him in a different direction. Reading this often reminded me of watching pantomimes as a small child, calling out warnings to characters to look out as the villain approached. Right from the start John is so obviously a walking red flag it’s almost unbearable to witness Jane fall for his dubious charms: he represents his previous girlfriend as crazed and clingy; he borrows money he won’t pay back; he sulks when Jane achieves any measure of success in her writing. As Jane’s life becomes intertwined with John’s, he quickly assumes a position of dominance; his numerous failed career plans take her away from her own promising career, as he ruthlessly moves them from city to city, rented home to rented home. John delights in reading, then rubbishing, Jane’s work in progress, and interrupting the tutoring sessions she takes on to bolster their shaky income, in order to undermine her teaching. In John’s world, only John’s words count.

Yet Jane not only stays with John, she marries him and later they have a child together. She seems to sleepwalk into what’s set to be a classically abusive relationship characterised by John’s particular brand of gaslighting and contemptuous, coercive control. Manguso’s documentation of Jane’s experiences has a diaristic, aphoristic quality similar in tone and style to her earlier non-fiction, sometimes presenting Jane’s daily life in near-forensic detail. The dynamics of Jane’s marriage reminded me of an only-slightly updated version of the relations between husband and wife in The Yellow Wallpaper. Like Manguso, Jane has an autoimmune blood disorder which can be disabling, and once spent time in a psychiatric facility, facts that John has no qualms in using against her. Labelling her "mad" and "unstable" when she dares to question his behaviour towards her, his weaponised incompetence, and dismissive attitudes. As Jane and her child grow dependent on John’s income, he further severs her ties to friends, family and increasingly the literary world in which her growing status threatens to overshadow his limited achievements. All of which Jane recognises but excuses on the basis that friends� marriages are equally flawed, that ultimately self-sacrifice is what being a wife and mother entails.

From the outside Jane’s apparent acceptance of her situation can seem like wilful self-immolation. But her uneasy acquiescence is a common response to existing in an abusive environment of this nature. As she ruefully remarks she’s in charge of everything, in control of nothing. It’s an environment fostered by a culture in which far too many heterosexual women are socialised to put their needs last, and heterosexual men to put theirs first. Jane’s own mother tells her she simply needs to be nicer to John. This is, after all, the America of the trad wife, a country in which a misogynistic theocracy is slowly taking shape. That’s not to say that Jane’s loss of self, or her ordeal, is a purely American phenomenon. As the global, viral success of Paris Paloma’s Labour illustrates - with its damning assessment of the expectations placed on heterosexual women in terms of emotional and physical domestic labour - Jane’s position is one many women will recognise, even if it's one they themselves have rejected.

It's a fascinating piece, riddled with instances of muted brutality; an unflinching, incredibly convincing portrayal of casual, devastating betrayals; the systematic demolition, and gradual rebuilding of a woman’s selfhood. Overall, an exceptionally powerful, accomplished novel.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC