Liars
Seethes with rage ... With a surgeon’s precision, Manguso painstakingly autopsies a couple’s unfolding — and increasingly toxic — relationship, chronicling each and every symptom of its pathology. If that sounds like a formula for an unsettling novel, you wouldn’t be wrong ... In recent years, it has become commonplace for writers to portray marriage — and motherhood, too — as a cross between joy and horror. There’s much horror here, minus the joy, except that Manguso is a masterful sentence writer and a brutally honest surveyor of the disadvantages women endure.
Read Full Review >>
Fierce ... It's a tour de force, but it is also relentless ... Bitterness is never attractive. But good writing is. Liars makes an old story fresh.
Read Full Review >>
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 ... John is very much his own creep, but also quite generic ... A question the novel will not easily answer: How to know when you are telling stories to those you love, let alone to yourself?
Read Full Review >>
