A masterclass in unease

'My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.’ So opens Manguso’s crystalline, mordant first novel about who belongs and who doesn’t in a declining Massachusetts town, as fortunes and status ebb and arrivistes displace the WASP gentry. Ruthie, the protagonist, has never felt at home in her hometown, and often wonders why; like other New England communities, Waitsfield hides its secrets well, until they erupt with a vengeance. Manguso puts her own indelible stamp on the literary terrain of John Cheever and Susan Minot, daring to brush against the third rail of class.

We applaud narrators who portray many people, but Lowman does the harder, subtler job of voicing the many moods of a single character. When Ruth is rueful, Lowman sounds it. Joyous. Same. When she’s disgusted, her tone and tempo match.

Magnificent . . . I hope all my fellow reader friends can find their way to this title either through their local library or independent bookseller. It is indeed special.

Sarah Manguso is one of the most original and exciting writers working in English today. Every word feels necessary, and she’s redefining genre as she goes

With its adult narrator trying to recover the intuitions of her younger self, Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Like Ferrante’s Lila and Lenu, Ruthie is sharply attuned to a force she doesn’t understand. Something is pushing through the cracks in the walls, the felted wool of her coat, but she lacks the context or language to name it . . . For Ruthie, the unseen current is some combination of class, whiteness, and the widespread sexual abuse of children.

Manguso is consistent in her approach and the cumulative effect is satisfying

Very Cold People knocked me to my knees. So precise, so austere, so elegant, this story is devastatingly familiar to those of us who know the loneliness of growing up in a place of extreme emotional restraint. Manguso is one of my favourite writers, and this book is a revelation

Midwesterners, New Englanders and anyone from small town America will recognize the contours in this quietly beautiful novel about what it feels like to grow up an outsider. It's a starkly lyrical exploration of the darkness that lies underneath a lily white community with an emotional resonance that sneaks up on you and won't let go.

I loved every sentence, thought, and gesture in this perfect novel. Sarah Manguso has painted a deeply moving portrait of the stark unreality of childhood

Stark and tremendous . . . I don’t think I’ve ever read a more clear-eyed account of the child’s matter-of-fact acceptance of adult cruelty. Very Cold People is a precise portrait of the inverted world of damage, a place where the solid objects, the chairs and tables and pencils and puddles, are all mysteriously ghosted by feeling, while the people walk around with the dead-cold solidity of objects. It’s both beautiful and unsettling. I loved it and am still trying to accommodate its cold quality - like swallowing an ice-cube by accident. Manguso’ steady gaze and clarity of expression is reminiscent of Louise Gluck. I hope it will do as brilliantly as it deserves.

The characters in Sarah Manguso’s first novel, Very Cold People, seem quite literally shaped, like ice sculptures, by their habitation of a grim town in Massachusetts . . . Though dealing with life’s ugly, messy truths, her writing is compact and beautiful . . . Manguso is terribly poignant on little Ruthie’s faith in a maternal love that isn’t really there, and her dawning comprehension of what might have made it impossible. But in damning increments, she also shows how feminine identity in America can be built up with material objects — dolls, Girl Scout insignia, barrettes, makeup, glittering confetti (another snow-echo) — and then torn down by violation, sexual and otherwise... So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain that when more dramatic plot turns arrive — suicides, teen pregnancies — they almost seem superfluous, visitations from an after-school special. The book is strong enough as a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. The effect is cumulative, and this novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight

A haunted masterpiece, written with the precision of a miniaturist and the vulnerability of true heartache. I wept more than once; I recognized myself more than once. Very Cold People proves yet again that Manguso is one of the greats

Unpicking the seamy side of a world sewn together by the everyday abuse of women and girls, Manguso reworks the stories women have been told about themselves into narratives that can be recognised, worked with. Very Cold People is an important stitch in a tapestry being urgently reworked by women writers. Manguso's is a bold stitch, a beautiful and a vital one.

A poignant and unnerving masterwork about growing up in a dominator society, told with the concision, carefulness, and sense of mystery that we’ve come to expect from Sarah Manguso

It’s impossible to read Manguso’s novel without wondering how much of the writer’s own life is in it. After all, her pithy and profound nonfiction (including 300 Arguments and Ongoingness) deals with time and mortality, among other topics, and she grew up in the same state. But to look for her between the lines misses the point in a book that gets at larger truths about countless girls caught in the cycle of generational trauma . . . Manguso’s attention to the chilliness and reservation of certain New Englanders crackles like a room-temperature beverage poured over ice . . . What elevates Very Cold People above a traditional coming-of-age novel is Manguso’s insistence on not being fooled by exterior markings — historical houses with plaques on them, people with icy demeanors . . . Manguso portrays the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity.

Chilling . . . Set in the 1980s in a small, frigid New England town, this coming-of-age story offers a stark take on what it is to feel poor, poorly nurtured, and inadequately loved in a class-conscious, lily-white town whose antique houses were built and occupied by generations of Cabots and Emersons . . . absorbs our attention and stirs empathy and reflection.

Very Cold People wields a kind of detached, anthropological power, portraying the world through the accumulation of telling details.

Unafraid to engage with tricky topics like race and class in America, Very Cold People may not warm your heart, necessarily. But it will pick you up after it knocks you down, and leave you stronger for it.

The first novel by acclaimed poet and critic Sarah Manguso is a bracing coming-of-age story and master class in controlled style. The unnamed narrator recalls growing up in Massachusetts on poverty’s edge. Her father is snappish and distant; her mother’s quick to judge and deeply narcissistic. As the story moves into the narrator’s teen years, the damage to her self-esteem begins to show . . . Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things . . . here she depicts her protagonist’s quiet agony with a poet’s eye . . . A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.

Manguso, author of several books of spellbinding nonfiction, depicts the fictional town of Waitsfield with documentary-level realism . . . Manguso’s trademark discrete paragraphs, separated by (snowy) white spaces, accumulate in detailed taxonomies of food and eating habits, bodies and their injuries, school and its tribulations . . . Formal and informal social structures receive similarly anthropological attention, from class distinctions and the nuances of bullying to the rituals and tokens of gift exchange, which may hold this frigid society together but never truly bonds it... Manguso is an exquisitely astute writer, and there is something admirable about her refusal to bow to predictable plot tropes that might rescue Ruthie more definitively — or condemn her. Still, her efforts to describe “everything” about Waitsfield may leave readers more chilled than satisfied . . . which is perhaps the point.