UBT: The NYT Review of Sarah Manguso’s Liars

The Universal Bullshit Translator digests “Whose Account Can You Trust?” the New York Times review by Brian Dillon of Sarah Manguso’s book Liars.

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The typical diet of the Universal Bullshit Translator consists of lurid sexts, non-apology apologies, and “Behold my journey of self-actualization!” mistress confessionals. It generally avoids the higher echelons of literary criticism (excepting Alain du Botton). Not because there isn’t bullshit in literary criticism, but because the UBT prefers earthier subjects like venereal disease.

Today, however, the UBT is making an exception for Irish critic Brian Dillon. A man as trenchant as a dish sponge. Who completely misses the point in his review of Sarah Manguso’s novel Liars, asking “Whose account can you trust?”

The narrator’s, you idiot.

It’s the story of one woman’s shitty marriage, told from the chump perspective. What’s so difficult to grasp here?

No, Tracy! It could be one of these tricksy literary devices! The unreliable narrator!

Right, like Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Only instead of a barmy governess reporting ghosts, we have Jane relating her terrible marriage. Don’t believe the mad woman! As if marital dysfunction was a leprechaun she imagined.

Let’s toss Brian Dillon’s review of Sarah Manguso’s Liars into the crushing mandibles of the Universal Bullshit Translator.

The aggrieved wife who narrates Sarah Manguso’s novel “Liars” may or may not be a reliable source about her monster of a husband.

I wrote “aggrieved” because hysterical cunt wouldn’t fit the deck.

Are husbands ever monsters? Let’s question the veracity of wives instead.

The cardinal mystery in Sarah Manguso’s second novel (she has also published several books of poetry, short stories and nonfiction) goes unplumbed until halfway through, when a neighbor is aghast at the narrator’s marital predicament: “Why are you still with him?”

A millennia of patriarchy aside, it’s a mystery why women stay in shitty marriages. Aghast neighbors everywhere wonder: “Why are you still with him?” and not: “Why are you such a waste of carbon, John?”

Jane, a writer with a teaching job, has been following her husband, John, back and forth across the United States while he parlays his failing art career into a lucrative one in film production. Now she barely writes, struggles to find academic work, spends her days caring for their son and coping with the fallout of John’s chaotic habits and wild ego. “He was the main character, and I was his wife. His mother had also been a wife. Wives and more wives, all the way down.”

Speaking for critics with dubious art careers, I resent this portrayal of a fuckwit and his partner appliance!

And yet Jane stays, because she believes a certain narrative: Theirs is a happy marriage, a happy family. “Liars” is an unflagging and acridly funny assault on that story, but also a formally canny study of how such tales get told — and how fragile our replacements may turn out.

Jane stays because she believes a certain narrative of happy marriage. Which has been spoon fed to her since childhood. Reinforced in every therapist office promoting reconciliation. Contained in every best-selling self-help book about infidelity. Weaponized in our political discourse (“childless, cat-lady“.) Culturally reinforced in every religious tradition. Gosh, the forces that compel Jane to stay in her shitty marriage are an absolute mystery.

Frankenfuckwit

What class of monster is John? Let me count his grisly ways. There are the dominating facts of his adultery, his definitive abandonment of Jane and the industrious untruth that goes with such ventures. But long before the end of their marriage he has been an exhausting object choice. He borrows $8,000 from Jane to make a movie and doesn’t pay it back; as his fortunes expand, he mocks her for not making enough money; he criticizes one of her books in company, saying she should have followed his advice about its structure; he tells people about her time in a psychiatric ward; he blames her for his own depression; he throws up his hands at tiny disappointments (the life model at his drawing class is a man!) and lounges about playing video games; he wants to know why his wife is so much angrier than other women.

Brian, you sound as flummoxed as John as to why Jane’s pissed. Maybe because a future NYT literary critic will question the veracity of her story?

Then there are the faults that would vex only a writer. Visiting Jane at her artist residency in Greece — she won a spot, he didn’t — John tries to impress the lunch table by bad-mouthing James Joyce. Worse: “I noticed that he used the word phenomena as a singular noun.”

Jane is a grammar nazi. I think she deserves chlamydia.

In other words John is very much his own creep, but also quite generic. His misdeeds range from the psychically devastating — without him Jane imagines herself not in the arms of a loving partner, but “dying alone, cradled by the universe” — to the seemingly trivial: He holds the baby wrong and throws his back out, he impulse-buys $40 worth of scallops. Beyond his physical attractiveness, he appears not to have a single redeeming feature.

John’s misdeeds are devastating, but can you really believe the account of a woman who would criticize scallop expenditures?

That is to say, John is both a convincing stand-in for large and small aspects of patriarchy, and a pure artifact of Jane’s rage,

Jane’s anger is misdirected. She’s enraged at the patriarchy. John is just a stand in, a bit of collateral damage, a caricature. Such creatures surely don’t exist! Can we really believe an angry woman about the details of her marriage?

(Someone needs to slap Brian upside the head with a pure artifact.)

a caricature from which much of the novel’s exasperated comedy derives — “Why are you still with him?” It is possible, Manguso’s broader narrative drift seems to suggest, to come back from this rage (and disbelief at one’s credulousness) to rescue much from life and art. But the litany — telling the marriage as one worries a rosary — remains, a weight of mundane fact that follows Jane around.

Abandonment is so mundane. A domestic triviality to fiddle with over your rosary beads.

As the title alerts us, there is more than one liar in this novel. How much should we trust Jane’s monologue, her she-said-she-said control of the narrative?

THE SCALLOPS WERE $30!

I’m sorry the UBT is malfunctioning. Is this a review of Sarah Manguso’s Liars or a tribunal on scorned wives? Are we burning Amber Heard effigies at noon? Must. soldier. on….

It is not so much that Manguso’s narrator is merely unreliable, hiding her own spousal failings and misrepresenting a more innocent or hapless John. 

YOU DROVE HIM TO IT, JANE, ADMIT IT!

Rather, “Liars” is interested in all the levels of storytelling that make up a marriage, that invent or bolster the idea of marriage in the first place, even for a smart and skeptical woman like Jane. Nobody is not a narrator in this setup; they are all spinning competing tales.

There’s no truth, only situational truth. Two sides to every story. No one knows what really goes on inside a marriage. Yes, even a smart and skeptical critic like Brian Dillon believes patriarchal tropes of bothsiderism that absolve abusers from accountability by attacking the credibility of their accusers.

Manguso, whose previous books have explored the laconic form of the aphorism and repurposed her own diaries,

Manguso, who is a much more celebrated writer than I could ever hope to be…

But UBT, he wrote “laconic form of the aphorism”!

here moves between fragmented and staccato registers — one brute fact after another — and interludes where Jane tries to write and rewrite a condensed version of her story in medias res, hoping to enliven the uniform font of her married life with italicized clarity. You could read “Liars” purely as an experiment in combining competing styles and narratives into one story — and that’s also what a marriage is.

In medias res. Latinam amo. Ego sum cucurbita caput.

When Jane and John are first together, marriage seems fantastical: “I’m a real wife, I thought, setting the table with cloth napkins. It felt like a parlor game.” Naiveté, disbelief or playful and ironic distance? It makes no difference; quite soon Jane “floated face down in housewifery.”

A condition, like the rest of her relationship, that involves infinitely subtler modes of narration, whether solace for her self-pitying husband or self-consolation in her moments of doubt about the whole enterprise. A question the novel will not easily answer: How to know when you are telling stories to those you love, let alone to yourself?

Surely Jane didn’t mean her vows. She knew marriage was an artifice all along, right? Jane was in on the parlor game. You can’t tell me a sophisticate like Sarah Manguso would actually write a truthful portrait of a marriage. This must be some literary ruse. You don’t expect me to actually relate to “floated face down in housewifery”?

(On the basis of this review, the UBT can absolutely imagine Brian Dillon floating face down in a manure lagoon.)

Being subsumed by marriage is not a thing. Losing your identity to a fuckwit is not a thing. The unequal burden of childcare is not a thing. I question Jane’s despair. I blame her for her husband’s wandering dick. And I doubt the truth of her story. That dick is probably tethered safely at home, penitent, never more to roam. I don’t know why Jane exaggerates so viciously. Menopause?

Jane is a liar. Isn’t Sarah Manguso Aren’t I clever?