Review: 'Very Cold People,' by Sarah Manguso

In an interview back in 2013, Sarah Manguso observed that, "The threat of being boring, of including too much, might be a particular peril" of memoir writing. But given her ever-growing bibliography of succinct and stringent work, it is not a peril that she has succumbed to so far.

Since 2002, Manguso has published two collections of poetry and five works of prose, including the acclaimed memoir "The Two Kinds of Decay" in 2008 and the aphoristic "300 Arguments" in 2017. Intellectually rigorous and formally meticulous, her work tends to possess a seriousness of tone and a concerted spareness, as well as a biting perfectionism and a zealous commitment to brevity. Lean and crisp, making a judicious use of its ample white space, her debut novel, "Very Cold People," continues in this exacting vein.

Told in a series of vignettes set in the snowy and covetous fictional town of Waitsfield, Mass., this brief novel follows its protagonist, Ruthie, as she comes of age under the frigid parenting of her housewife Jewish-American mother and accountant Italian-American father, as well as the predatory attentions of male teachers, coaches, relatives and doctors. Waitsfield is a place where "on winter mornings, the light spread like a watery broth over the landscape" and where wealth and whiteness are rarely called by those names, even as they tower atop a hierarchy that puts anything else in a position of shame mingled with aspiration.

Ruthie observes, "my mother cut out wedding announcements from the Courier, the only paper in town," adding, "Maybe the groom was a Cabot, and the bride was an Emerson, and they sat on the boards of libraries and museums. My mother didn't know these people, but she liked the way they looked on our refrigerator."

In their insufficiently old and historic house, "Creditors called all day and into the evening," requiring Ruthie to "pick up the phone and say that I was home alone."

With glacial precision and mordant wit, Manguso delineates a milieu in which class and gender get silenced by lip service to the American dream. Ruthie's mother hangs "antique prints of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on the walls as if we lived inside a schoolgirl's report," making sure Ruthie understands that these figures are "more important than anyone in my family."

Manguso has an unerring eye for the details that characterized a certain kind of Gen X girlhood, including sticker collections and friendship pins and how "everything smelled like strawberries then — stickers, lip gloss, hair." But far from being an exercise in nostalgia, the novel's memories accumulate into something more unsettling.

Ruthie's powers of observation catalog everything, including how the fifth-grade girls play four square in a manner less carefree than the fourth-graders: "It wasn't so much that they looked different; they just looked as if they knew they were being watched."

Like a sculpture made of ice cubes, each spartan prose brick accumulates into a single structure. Short as it is, "Very Cold People" feels monumental: an icy cenotaph for a not-so-distant past.

Kathleen Rooney is the author of "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk" and, most recently, "Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey."

Very Cold People
By: Sarah Manguso.
Publisher: Hogarth, 208 pages, $26.