When It Comes to a Bad Marriage, Whose Account Can You Trust?

LIARS, by Sarah Manguso

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?”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”