Very Cold People: A Novel

“Though dealing with life’s ugly, messy truths, her writing is compact and beautiful. So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain. . . [the book is] a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.” — Thexa0New York Times “Reading Manguso is like watching someone skin an animal, slice its throat and drain its blood, preparing it quickly and efficiently for consumption. You wonder, reading her succinct and devastating sentences, just what she had to do to get there.” — Los Angeles Times “[Manguso] belongs to a cohort of minimalist, stream-of-consciousness writers—Jenny Offill,xa0Sheila Heti,xa0Eula Biss—whose texts work out the equations of domestic life and creative ambition.” —New Yorker “A searing catalogue of pinched bitterness . . . But with her gemlike apercus, Manguso renders this bleakness oddly fascinating.” —Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine “A chilling first novel . . . 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…. Very Cold People does what we ask of good literature: It absorbs our attention and stirs empathy and reflection.” —NPR “In this carefully constructed novel, the pervasive cold is as human as it is meteorological. Manguso is an exquisitely astute writer.” — Boston Globe “With glacial precision and mordant wit, Manguso delineates a milieu in which class and gender get silenced by lip service to the American dream. Very Cold People feels monumental: an icy cenotaph for a not-so-distant past.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune “[Manguso’s] prose is, like a red wine reduction, boiled down to its most potent iteration, It’s all killer, no filler with Manguso.” — AV Club “Breathtakingly well-written.” — Shelf Awareness “Sarah Manguso isxa0one of the most original and exciting writers working in English today. Every word feels necessary, and she’s redefining genre as she goes.” —Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies “ Very Cold People knocked me to my knees.xa0So precise, so austere, so elegant,xa0this storyxa0is devastatingly familiar to those of us who know the lonelinessxa0of growing up in a place of extreme emotionalxa0restraint.” —Lauren Groff, author of Florida “A haunted masterpiece, written with the precision of a miniaturist and the vulnerability of true heartache.xa0I wept more than once; I recognized myself more than once. Very Cold People proves yet again thatxa0Manguso is one of the greats.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less “I loved every sentence, thought, and gesture in thisxa0perfect novel.xa0Sarah Manguso has painted a deeply moving portrait of thexa0stark unreality of childhood.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Pew “A poignant and unnerving masterworkxa0about growing up in a dominator society,xa0told with the concision, carefulness, and sense of mystery that we’ve come to expect from Sarah Manguso.” —Tao Lin, author of Leave Society “Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things. . . . A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Sarah Manguso is the author of eight books. Her previous book, 300 Arguments , a genre-defying work of aphoristic nonfiction, was named a best book of the year by more than twenty publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her work is regularly featured across The New York Times Magazine , O: The Oprah Magazine , and The New Yorker , among others. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles. Very Cold People is her first novel. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway. My mother answered the first knock at the door of the new house, expecting a casserole. We’d painted the house Evening Fog, she told me, but the woman from across the street wanted to know why we’d painted it purple like Italians. Some people wore their difference honestly, but my parents were liars, illegitimate Waitsfielders, their off-xadwhiteness discovered only after the paint had dried. By the time I was born, the house had faded to the color of dirty snow. The oldest houses in Waitsfield were older than the town and bore plaques to mark their age. Generations of families had been born and died in them, and the town’s six graveyards were populated mostly by children. Over the centuries the slate stones had eroded and sunk in the dirt, and they looked like gray, crooked teeth inscribed with little lambs and angels. On the way to school I walked past a three-xadhundred-xadyear-xadold mustard-xadyellow saltbox that my mother admired for its leaded glass windows and historically correct paint color. It probably had all the right antique fixtures inside, big sooty hearths and Indian shutters, visible proof of connection to the first, best people. My mother referred to western Massachusetts as out west, and I was mostly ignorant of the geography beyond our neighborhood. Three-xadquarters of the town stayed unknown to me, and that mystery drummed up a sense of scale. To this day I couldn’t tell you how to get to the Lodge School, where the rich kids went. It was just there, somewhere, in those ten square miles, not for me to find. I often asked my mother to drive us down to the part of town where every house had a plaque. It looked like a movie set. I knew a girl whose house had been used in a television ad for a clothing store. The ad was shot in the spring, and the crew had sprayed the lawn and the windowsills with sticky fake snow. At home, my mother cut out wedding announcements from the Courier, the only paper in town. Maybe the groom was a Cabot, and the bride was an Emerson, and they sat on the boards of libraries and museums. My mother didn’t know these people, but she liked the way they looked on our refrigerator. She also liked to study an old typeset record of the town’s census, turning the well-xadhandled pages as one would a beloved picture book, but there were no pictures, just lists of names and addresses. She cross-xadreferenced the addresses with real estate listings in the Courier each week. Sometimes she took me to look at the big old houses. I never saw any people, just the houses, big Georgian colonials with widow’s walks and little gabled windows like third eyes opening. I liked the estates, too, especially on Pond Road, which my mother told me was the most expensive street in town. Pond was a dead end, so it took some persuading to get my mother to drive the length of it and turn the car around, but when I reminded her that we’d never seen another soul walking or even driving around there, she could be tempted. Those houses weren’t old. They were just enormous and ornate, with statuary and foreign-xadmade cars. A couple of them were always under construction and hidden under blue tarps. I recognized the difference between the houses that were the oldest and those that were merely the most expensive. I liked the old houses, and I swooned over the girls and boys at school with names like Verity and Cornelius. I knew that I could never build the kind of relationship with money that the people in those stately, drafty, oldest houses enjoyed. I didn’t even bother trying to infiltrate them. I worshipped them from a distance. In our house the old paint on the windowsill had its own sweet smell, different from the wall paint. I felt all around the window sash to find a draft, but there was none. The cold was just everywhere. After the monthly mortgage payment, my parents had almost nothing left over, and we had to be careful. For one thing, the bathtub had to be filled to the height of my hand, and no higher. I pressed my fingertips into the bottom of the tub, not knowing where my hand ended and my wrist began. One summer I found a green garden hose on the ground next to a neighbor’s house. The hose had been left on. I tried to calculate the amount of water that had been wasted. What are we gonna do? I asked the other kids. They didn’t answer. Adrenaline spilled into my blood. Water poured into the muddy ground. An old Irish cable-xadknit cardigan with leather buttons hung in the downstairs coat closet, which smelled of hot farts and smoke. If anyone ever needed a sweater, they could go and put on the warming sweater, which was its name, as if other sweaters were merely decorative. My mother kept the house just cold enough for me to need to wear the warming sweater over my regular sweater, and she cut just enough plastic wrap to cover the diameter of a dish. I sat on the carpeted floor with my back against the radiator. It slowly bruised me, and if the heat came on, it turned my skin red in columns. A sheet of rigid plastic leaned between the radiator and the wall. It was meant to reflect heat back into the room. Autumn brought with it the slap-xadclatter of crows, fire smells, leafy sweet-xadrot. New corduroys, cold air, brown paper grocery bags folded over schoolbooks. Writing on the first xadpages of notebooks, September 7. September 8. September 9, never sure how my handwriting should look. We had two sugar maples in the backyard, and my mother liked them best because their leaves turned bright red, the farthest possible from their original green. One of the maples got sick, and she hired a man to cut it down. She said that the man had come and started cutting, and that she’d stopped watching him, and that when he came back to the house to get paid, she looked again and saw that he’d cut down both maples. Dead and gone. She would mourn those red trees the rest of her life. When I walked home from school, I picked up leaves that were gold-xadspecked crimson, green-xadedged vermilion, purple-xadblack. I picked everything up, pebbles and matchbooks and little things people dropped. In December, I picked up evergreen branches and taped them to my bedroom door and made decorations, a little Christmas garland just for me. One day my mother emptied my jacket pockets and found two half-xadused matchbooks and screamed at me. I could have started a fire. But I wouldn’t have wasted a match to start a mere fire. I’d found what someone else had thought was trash, so I took it. On winter mornings the light spread like a watery broth over the landscape. My father drove a used silver sports car whose turn signals didn’t work. Even in the winter, he stuck his arm out the window and signaled left or right as if he were pedaling a bicycle. He started the car and let the motor run while I got into the passenger seat and wrapped the twisted black seat belt around my lap. He scraped the windshields and the side windows with a beveled piece of clear plastic. I liked the sound of it, like a giant filing his nails. The bits of scraped-xadoff ice looked like fluff; the air was too cold to melt it. Read more