Genre Fiction
![Sarah Manguso - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_sarah_manguso.jpg)
Very Cold People: A Novel
The masterly debut novel from "an exquisitely astute writer" (The Boston Globe), about growing up in-and out of-the suffocating constraints of small-town America.
"Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight."-The New York Times
"Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend."-The New Yorker
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping
"My parents didn't belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway."
For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known.
Once home to the country's oldest and most illustrious families-the Cabots, the Lowells: the "first, best people"-by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets.
Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield.
As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm-from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive.
In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in-and out of-the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.
"Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight."-The New York Times
"Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend."-The New Yorker
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping
"My parents didn't belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway."
For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known.
Once home to the country's oldest and most illustrious families-the Cabots, the Lowells: the "first, best people"-by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets.
Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield.
As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm-from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive.
In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in-and out of-the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.
Editorial Reviews
"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 is one ...
"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 is one ...
Readers Top Reviews
bookreader
Scripted in short vignettes. Builds almost invisibly to a horrifying crescendo. Masterfully constructed, vividly written, with characters that stay with you, sometimes much longer than you would like.
Carol McKellarKHi
First, it is not a novel but a collection of alleged childhood memories written in separated, unrelated paragraphs. Who did the author know to get this published? Boring!!!
L. SnodgrassCarol
A powerful novel of emotional abuse by an honest narrator. Dysfunctional parents and the way a child navigates that world. I also liked the ending.
Tad MasthayDonna
An exceptionally sad story of the private abuses carried out on those around us and their consequences though admittedly without much narrative originality. Spare but not in an interesting way. Worth a read though for upholding empathy and righteous anger if that’s what your in need of.
Short Excerpt Teaser
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.
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-handled pages as one would a beloved picture book, but there were no pictures, just lists of names and addresses. She cross-referenced 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-made 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 wast...
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.
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-handled pages as one would a beloved picture book, but there were no pictures, just lists of names and addresses. She cross-referenced 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-made 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 wast...
