300 ARGUMENTS
by Sarah Manguso; Graywolf Press (104 pages, $14)
The only thing more difficult than reviewing Sarah Manguso’s “300 Arguments” is not reviewing it.
Her biting collection of aphorisms merits a wide audience, especially of people taking life on the Mithridates plan of self-inoculation against the world’s toxins. But be forewarned that Manguso’s bracing words often suggest those toxins are self-generated.
She has essentially reviewed this work herself in one of her arguments: “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.” Thus she pre-empts my reviewer’s legwork of hunting for them. She has piled all of the Easter eggs together on the lawn.
“Arguments,” rather than aphorisms, is a fitting word in her title, for these brief passages are hot-blooded, intense and frequently personal: “What’s more
exciting than an affair? Knowing the other’s willingness to have an affair.”
That example was not chosen randomly. Manguso writes powerfully about desire, often using a familiar short word I can’t put in the newspaper. “In my dating days, as soon as I anticipated going to bed with someone, it seemed absurd, irrational to further resist the inevitable.” For Manguso, this cut-to-the-chase tendency permeates her intellectual life, too. The concluding line in that dating days argument: “If there’s a good line in a book, I will copy out the line and sell the book.”
She offers a master class in a specific strain of desire: envy, the (often resentful) longing to have what someone else has. To rip off a Chris Hedges title, for Manguso sometimes envy is a force that gives her life meaning. Thinking of two women, both brilliant, one beautiful and one not, she realizes that she does not envy one or the other exactly: “I envy a hybrid monster with some qualities of each woman but all of neither—a monster I dreamt up specifically to envy.”
She connects this forceful but painful emotion to her art. “Envy is a narrative impulse: if I got what I wanted, what would happen then?”
Her takes on motherhood ring with truth. “Parental love is a one-way, all-consuming love, like a crush that asks nothing of its object. You can inhabit it totally, and no one will try to heal you of it.” In another argument, she writes of past pursuit of sex, drugs and rough neighborhoods “to enjoy the feeling of wasting my life, of tempting danger.” But now: “Motherhood has finally satisfied that hunger. It’s a self-obliteration that never stops and that no one notices.”
Writers may appreciate her acid takes on artistic lives, ambitions and laments. For example, take this revision tip: “The fastest way to revise a piece of work is to send it, late at night, to someone whose opinion you fear. Then rewrite it, praying you’ll finish in time to send a new version by morning.”
“Respect the one-hit wonder,” she writes, “not for his one hit but for all the days he must have suffered afterward, trying for another.”
True poet and philosopher that she is, Manguso also faces Time and its henchman, Entropy. “Happiness begins to deteriorate once it is named,” she writes pithily.
And this: “Today, for the first time, I sent a fan letter to someone younger than I am. It marks a change in my relationship to the world.” (I know the feeling.)
And this: “I look at young people and marvel at their ignorance of what’s coming, and the old people look at me.”
My field test for writing like this: Does it produce a rueful inner smile or shudder of recognition? Manguso’s arguments do so many times.
For readers who want more of Manguso, try “The Two Kinds of Decay” (2008), her memoir about living with a life-threatening autoimmune illness, and “Ongoing: The End of a Diary” (2015). For more aphorisms from a contemporary master that Manguso greatly respects, look for the books of James Richardson.