‘My parents were liars,’ the narrator Ruthie says at the beginning of Sarah Manguso’s unsettling debut novel. Looking back on her abusive childhood in a New England town near Boston in the 1980s, she recounts how her father wore a fake Rolex that didn’t work, and her narcissistic mother was obsessed with social climbing, pinning the wedding announcements of local Mayflower descendants on the fridge as if she knew them. Ruthie observes everything in high definition, from her parents’ neglect (‘I have no memories of being held’) to their naked bodies flopping on top of each other while they all share the same bed. In a disturbing scene, her mother, who seems to have been traumatised by her own upbringing, asks her elementary school daughter to spell the f-word.
Manguso excels at capturing the perspective of a child desperate for the love of people who don’t know how to give it. When Ruthie gets braces, her mother pulls puffy-lipped faces at her. ‘She wanted me to know I was ugly,’ Ruthie decides. ‘She was helping me get ready for the world.’
The novel’s backdrop simmers with menace. The gravestones of dead children are ‘gray, crooked teeth inscribed with little lambs and angels’, and autumn brings the ‘slap-clatter of crows’. Rumours spread about the town’s police officer, who molests a boy by ‘accident’. The suffocating societal pressures of growing up as a female in America are also carefully drawn. By the sixth grade, the girls peel off their fingernails, and Ruthie’s pockets are stuffed with paper napkins containing unswallowed meals. ‘I don’t dress for myself; I dress for boys,’ one schoolfriend tells Ruthie; we find out later that ‘she woke up in a strange place, bleeding’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in