Very Cold People

 

Summary (from the publisher): The much-anticipated debut novel from the author of 300 Arguments: a shattering account of growing up and out of the suffocating constraints of small-town America.

For Ruthie, the frozen, snow-padded town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. But this is no picturesque New England. Once "home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God," by the tail-end of the twentieth century it is an unforgiving place, awash with secrets.

Very Cold People tells Ruthie's story, through her eyes: from the shame handed down through her immigrant forebears and indomitable mother, to the violences 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.

Part social commentary and part Gothic horror, Very Cold People is an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has produced a masterwork on how very cold places make for very cold people, and a pitiless look at an all-American whiteness.

Review: Told in first person narration, this coming of age tale tells Ruthie's story of growing up in Waitsfield, Massachusetts. Surrounded by storied homes and families proud of their historic names, the reality for Ruthie is not a picturesque New England experience but a much darker, colder world. Ruthie's inheritance isn't that of a family name or a family home but a legacy of shame and hidden abuse. Likewise, her friends, who are also on the periphery of the notable society of Waitsfield, is riddled by trauma and unhappy secrets. 

In this novel, the cold, stark winters of New England mirror the emotionally cold environment of Ruthie's home. Her mother seems determined to stamp out any flashes of happiness and childishness in Ruthie's behavior. The novel is ripe with sexuality just behind closed doors: the not so well concealed sex life of her parents, the growing sexual awareness of Ruthie herself, the growing knowledge of illicit sexual affairs, and the most dark of all - sexual abuse experienced by several of the characters. While Ruthie is shielded by this, it surrounds and indelibly shapes her childhood. 

At heart this is the story of a girl who doesn't feel like she quite belongs anywhere: not in her town, not in her school, and not in her family. Her clothes, her parents' accent, her family's discomfort in wealthy relatives' homes, all mark them out as outsiders and other and this feeling only intensifies as Ruthie becomes a teenager. A depressing, bleak book of a lonely childhood with a punitive mother and an unwelcoming community.

Stars: 3