Very Cold People

September 1, 2021

The Rome Prize-winning Manguso, best known for her aphoristic 300 Arguments, offers a debut novel that limns the limits of small-town white American life. Not postcard pretty like some other New England towns, chilly Waitsfield, MA, is often snowbound, and for Ruthie it's a place where her high school friends meet violence and her own immigrant past is a source of shame. Can she ever get away from the "very cold people" around her?

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October 25, 2021
A solemn yet deeply empathic bildungsroman, Manguso’s debut novel (after the essay collection 300 Arguments) centers on a girl whose life unravels in a fictional Massachusetts town. The only child of a European Jewish mother and an Italian father, Ruth has spent her entire youth in Waitsfield, a place defined by its colonial histories and class differences. She shares stories of her personal and ancestral history in abbreviated accounts, delving into how the traumas of poverty pervaded every aspect of her and her family’s life, as well as how the abuse that Ruth and her friends continuously suffered at the hands of their parents, teachers, and caretakers impinged on their ability to imagine a life outside of Waitsfield. The vignettes don’t have a lot of momentum, but as a whole they render a sweeping view of a girl’s troubled coming-of-age with a solemnity that both wonders at and highlights the heartbreakingly persistent hope that lies at the core of Ruth’s life story. Manguso’s complex work will inspire reflection. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

January 1, 2022
There is no warmth in Waitsfield, Massachusetts, a colonial town that's as forbidding as the cold that permeates Ruthie's house in its poorer neighborhood. This gritty coming-of-age tale follows friendships, crushes, and fantasies through Ruthie's teenage years as she navigates neglect at home and a tumultuous relationship with her mother. Known for nonfiction books such as 300 Arguments (2017), Manguso paints a haunting portrait of innocence lost, with snippets of prose that gradually evolve from brief paragraphs to pages. These first-person windows into Ruthie's upbringing, though initially jarring and seemingly mundane, masterfully unveil the tragic and disturbing fates of girls in Waitsfield. When Ruthie begins to recognize an alarming pattern of abuse even in those closest to her, she wrestles with the dangers of silence and the violence against young girls by men, from tennis coaches to family members to strangers on the train. Confronted by secrets spanning generations, she must find a way to escape the town's dark history. A gripping debut novel on the vulnerability of girlhood for readers who enjoy steady but intense storytelling.

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Starred review from February 1, 2022
A woman recalls her girlhood and adolescence through the lenses of family dysfunction and sexual assault. The first novel by acclaimed poet and critic Manguso is a bracing coming-of-age story and master class in controlled style. The narrator, Ruthie, recalls growing up in Massachusetts on poverty's edge. Her father is snappish and distant; her mother's quick to judge and deeply narcissistic. ("The doctor said, Oh, she's beautiful, when he pulled me out, and my mother had thought he was talking about her.") As the story moves into Ruthie's teen years, the damage to her self-esteem begins to show: She's anxious around anybody she sees as her betters (which is almost everyone) and sees bullying and ostracism as her due. The plainspokenness of her voice--recalling early Ann Beattie and the dirty realists--at once underplays the tension and suggests just how tightly coiled she is. By the time she enters high school, she's exposed to a new ecosystem of sexualized mistreatment, from inappropriate touches to rape. Police officers, gym teachers, and family members all seem to be wired for exploitation. So her self-harm intensifies (she pulls out her eyelashes) alongside her awareness not just of sexual abuse, but of how common it is among those around her, which leads to the novel's powerful conclusive revelations. Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things--her previous books were built around lyric essays on suicide and autoimmune disease, and here she depicts her protagonist's quiet agony with a poet's eye. ("My shame fell from the ceiling like snow.") But the elegance doesn't diminish the emotional impact of her story and the journey of becoming mature enough to understand transgression, be horrified by it, and search for a means to escape it. A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.

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