Very Cold People

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-­whiteness 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-­hundred-­year-­old mustard-­yellow 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-­quarters 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.

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.

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. The New 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, Sheila Heti, Eula 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