‘Very Cold People’

“How much of human life is lost in waiting!” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote — and perhaps no stretch of time can feel like more of a slog than the endless years of childhood and adolescence, two decades when every trivial and critical thing can take on extra weight and significance. It’s a time of judgment, of other people and especially the self.

In Sarah Manguso’s debut novel, “Very Cold People,” a woman named Ruthie reflects on growing up in the aptly named fictional small town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts. “I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me. … My life felt unreal and I felt halfinvested. I felt indistinct, like someone else’s dream.” In looking back at that time, she can give herself a more definitive shape. (One can’t help but think of the title of Eimear McBride’s novel, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.”) 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. There are frigid temperatures outside and inside Ruthie’s home. Her parents don’t have a lot of money. They keep a “warming sweater” in the coat closet to save on utilities, and their daughter has to field phone calls from creditors.

Ruthie’s short, vivid memories accumulate like snowflakes on a windowsill, many centered on her complicated relationship with her difficult mother, a woman whose coldness is its own distinctive parenting style. She’s the kind of mother who makes her own better version of a scarf that Ruthie knits for her, then gives the inferior one back to her daughter. “After school I walked home from the bus stop,” Ruthie recalls. “When I turned the corner to our street, I could see my mother waiting at the front window. Sometimes she made a face at me with puffy lips. I had braces on my teeth and she wanted me to know that I wasn’t fooling anyone, trying to close my mouth around them. She wanted me to know I was ugly. She was helping me get ready for the world.”

Ruthie points out the surreal qualities of living in a hometown laden with so much history, even stating that her own childhood felt like it took place in the 1600s, but she also fixates on more concrete and visceral moments. She thinks about the pleasure from “white wet snow squeaking against my teeth, melting clear in the heat of my mouth.” Manguso captures both the repelling and beautiful aspects of girls’ bodies: oily hair and fingernails “peeling off in layers like mica.”

As Ruthie matures and learns about men taking advantage of or abusing her friends, it hits even harder when she realizes her own mother has suppressed traumatic experiences. The greatest threat to girls and women is the unwillingness to see what’s right in front of you, barely obscured. “It was clear to me that what had happened to [my mother] wasn’t rare but normal, that it was too common even to register as a story.”

But it is perhaps the story, what happens to girls and women behind closed doors and out in the open. How can mothers protect their daughters if they can’t acknowledge what they went through? Especially when they live in small town America, in cloistered communities where seemingly endless cycles of violence and silence are reinforced by what has come before and what will happen again. In “Very Cold People,” danger is everywhere: in old, looming homes, in schools, in psychiatric wards, even in seemingly lighthearted pursuits. “Crouched there at the side of the pool, I stared into the bright blue depths,” Ruthie recalls. “Something unendurable lay at the bottom of that pool.” Manguso portrays the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity.

Michele Filgate is a writer and the editor of the essay collection “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About.”

By Sarah Manguso

Hogarth. 208 pp. $26