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2.5 rounded down

“I remember how desperately I had to cling to the story of my happy marriage. It took effort. It felt so good to stop lying.��

Unpleasant and increasingly oppressive as the pages are turned, this novel (which reads more like a misery memoir) highlights the degree to which one woman sacrificially binds herself to cultural expectations and narratives—fairytales—about marriage. Jane, a writer, documents her fourteen-year relationship with would-be filmmaker/photographer/entrepreneur John, a narcissistic boor and loser. She willfully overlooks the multiple glaring warning signs—the selfishness and immaturity—that make him a far from suitable partner for anyone. The reader then gets a play-by-play of his ongoing insensitivity, irresponsibility, inattentiveness, laziness, carelessness, sense of entitlement, poor judgement, reactivity, enviousness, fragile ego, predilection for late nights (drinking, video games, flirting), sulkiness, arrogance, disdain, contempt, etc. etc. You name a negative, you’ve got it in John, the ultimate “piece of work.��

However (and importantly) instead of fleeing and self-correcting as a functional, basically reasonable, emotionally attuned individual would, Jane persists in her disastrous, toxic marriage. (Whether this is due to a history of mental health issues, some inner sense of being defective, is never totally clear.) She tallies up innumerable reasons for resentment and tells herself endless lies to justify her staying, displaying a degree of contempt for John that rivals his for her. She has a child with him. (Thank God she resists the impulse to have a second.) More than once she comments on how “lucky�� she is. Yes, really. She is as much to blame for the mess she’s in as her nightmare of a husband.

People are not reasonable. I get that. I got that long before reading this. So what, exactly, is the point of this book? It appears to be autobiographical fiction. I guess the author was . . . hmm . . . “working it out.��

Manguso’s prose is generally strong. In terms of tone, there’s a lot of bitterness here, of course. There’s also sardonic humour. The language is not infrequently raw, coarse, and ugly. (view spoiler)[Do we really need to know about her bowel movements? And forget the euphemism “making love�� or the plainer “having sex.�� You won’t find those here. (hide spoiler)]

Is this is a great, valuable, or illuminating novel? I don’t think so. Reading the first long section, “Liars,�� is an experience akin to rubbernecking on a highway. As for the final “Afterward�� section—in which the narrator grieves her lost time and comes to terms with the schmaltzy fantasy she bought into—although it’s twice as short as the first, it felt two times as long. At least the narrator does figure out why she married:
“Early on, maybe five years in, John had said, Are you only with me because I’m dark and handsome? and I’d said, I’ve left darker and handsomer, which had been true. But I saw now that it had also been a dodge. Even then, I’d known I was drawn mainly to his body.��
She also understands the reasons she remained. Among them:
“I’d simply told myself that I was wrong. That’s why I’d stayed. I was stubborn. I’d refused to admit I’d been wrong about him. [. . .] I thought a better man might leave me.��

All of it seems pretty obvious to me: talented women continue to throw away years of their lives for the sake of having a mate and fulfilling some weird fantasy about marriage. They do so by lying to themselves about themselves, about the man they’ve elected to be with, and about the mess they’ve got themselves into. However, contrary to the narrator’s insistence that women are coerced “by an entire civilization,�� I believe they often do have agency; they simply refuse to exercise it and to take responsibility.

I know why I started this novel—I’d heard about Manguso and was interested in trying her work—but I’m not sure why I bothered to finish it. Maybe I wanted to know just what it would take for the main character to come to her senses. (view spoiler)[Unfortunately, as is so often the case, it is only after she’s learned of this sorry excuse for a man’s lengthy affair with a married high-school friend. It is his outright rejection of the narrator, his decision to leave her, that finally does the trick. “John’s betrayal,�� she observes, “was a gift. My last bits of romantic silliness, all burned away.�� (hide spoiler)] It’s a sad state of affairs that years of psychotherapy afforded her so little insight and so few tools for extricating herself from an awful mess.