Sarah Manguso and the Rage Plot

On the first page of Sarah Manguso’s electrifying, devastating novel Liars, the narrator warns her reader that she has “got enmeshed in a story that’s already been told ten billion times.” Liars follows the 15-year relationship between Jane and John (the names tip us off that we may be dealing with archetypes, waiting to be disturbed), from their brief courtship to the end of their tormented, tumultuous marriage. But as the narrator’s opening self-consciousness hints, Liars is also a metanarrative of sorts: a novel about how to evoke the systemic ills of heterosexuality, marriage, and gender, even and especially when we experience our position within those institutions in idiosyncratic and individual terms.