“With my chewing gum I could blow a bubble inside a bubble,” Ruthie announces, in a detailed passage about all the boring things she does when she is bored. The most significant incidents-a slap, a seduction, a suicide-exist only as rumors, referred to after the fact, and the material that does make it to the page behaves like anti-narrative. “Very Cold People” is itself a very cold book, with banks of white space piled up around Manguso’s short, accretive paragraphs.
When Bee’s mother, who may or may not be complicit in this abuse, refers to tater tots as “ b’day-does,” she might as well be a sorceress, the patrician phrase an incantation. For Ruthie, the unseen current is some combination of class, whiteness, and the widespread sexual abuse of children. For the Italian girls, the invisible power was political violence: Lila and Lenu interpret Don Achille, the neighborhood’s fascist thug, as an ogre who eats children. 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. Like Ferrante’s Lila and Lenu, Ruthie is sharply attuned to a force she doesn’t understand. 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. Here, as in many fairy tales, a feeling of magic corresponds to the feeling of the unknown. You half expect the characters to be devoured by wolves. The book’s symmetries, prototypical figures, and brutality heighten the Grimmish mood. Amber pairs off with her own half brother a tennis coach starts sleeping with Charlie Bee’s father places her on his lap so that she can pretend to drive his sports car. Each girl represents a different shading of social caste, but Ruthie watches as they all attract the attentions of older men. Charlie, who has a maid and lives in a Victorian manse, is mature and aloof.
Bee, whose father made his money in construction, is soft and shy. Amber, whose father works as a mechanic, is confident and kind. There’s something schematic about Amber, Bee, and Charlie, Ruthie’s closest friends in Waitsfield. The book has a fairy-tale quality, a ring of the nursery rhyme. Ruthie relays a vision of herself, as a girl, playing with her mom: “I laughed so hard I thought I might burst.” A reader senses a thrum of love beneath the harshness. At home, where she sits, bundled up, with her back against the radiator, “the cold was just everywhere.” Blowing through her memories is “the powder of the coldest days, too cold to melt, squeaking at the boot.” Ruthie’s mother makes fun of her daughter’s braces and wears “cheap shiny nightgowns” over “her lumpy body.” Yet there are hints of a more complicated story. Her world is animated by two axioms: it’s cold, and she hates her mother.
Waitsfield is old, rich America, full of Cabots, Lowells, and houses “with little gabled windows like third eyes opening.” Ruthie, whose parents are Jewish and Italian, wears outlet-store sweaters and pockets other people’s trash. The book follows Ruthie, an only child growing up in the fictional town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts. With her début novel, “ Very Cold People,” the poet and memoirist Sarah Manguso weaves it into the coming-of-age tale. These poets were evoking a type of understanding-that the universe was not made for humans, even if humans find it beautiful-that is often associated with middle or late life.
And Elizabeth Bishop compared knowledge-the real, pure stuff-to freezing water: “If you should dip your hand in, / your wrist would ache immediately, / your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn / as if the water were a transmutation of fire / that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.” Robert Frost wrote that he grasped “enough of hate” to know that the apocalypse might come draped in ice. Samuel Coleridge wondered at “the secret ministry” of frost. Poets have long approached the cold with a shiver of respect, aligning it with the least hospitable, most mysterious kinds of truth. Sarah Manguso’s new book has a fairy-tale quality, a ring of the nursery rhyme.