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.
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?
Jane...searches for self-knowledge in a woebegone key ... Liars makes the rot in this marriage visible from the beginning ... John’s version of events—his intentions and perspective—is entirely absent. Jane does not seem to entertain them, nor does Manguso. There is a strange lack of motive in the book ... What is this vision of womanhood, of sexually indiscriminate infants running households? For all her subtlety, Manguso has always evinced a tendency to make broad, sometimes crude generalizations, to break the world into types ... This book, in its blazing assurance, tells a thin and partial tale, frayed by silences that feel more like blind spots than like the canny omissions of old ... The finality of such diagnoses stunts Manguso’s account, keeps it from becoming a more persuasive story, where we would genuinely feel for and trust the protagonist, experience the full measure of her loss and exploitation.
Manguso is a master of the searing aphoristic insight ... Liars is a compulsive, claustrophobic book to read, but it’s also curiously thin, starved of oxygen in the way that Jane herself is. The years, as they amass, are necessarily repetitive ... There’s a sense in the final stages that Manguso is pulling away from herself as an aphorist, and pushing towards a richer, wider mimetic vision.
Gorgeously written, eminently readable ... Jane's voice is frustrated, eloquent, philosophical and repetitive ... Manguso's latest is a story wholly and brilliantly told.
An excoriating portrait of a marriage. In brisk prose, Manguso tells the story of John and Jane ... Manguso’s barbed sentences push the plot forward at a brisk pace. The author is at the top of her game.
