VERY COLD PEOPLE

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.