Sex, trust fund kids and donating blood

BEING able to write well about sex is a gift few writers possess. Writing  about the absence of sex – where sex is desired but the participating parties do not connect, is almost impossible. Sex can get dirty, tilt sloppily over to the things that thrive on shameless websites. The absence of sex requires a different space, one that is not easily visited due to the unease one encounters there..

Sarah Manguso's novel Liars stars with a happy sex life and ends with a description of the way one must accept that the sexual side of your existence has become dormant for now, before you can begin to live again. Your sexual partner must first die in your head.

Liars is a novel that appeals to the rooms of your soul in such a way that you have to finish it in one sitting – you know that if you pause halfway, you may never find the courage to complete it.

It tells the story of the marriage of Jane (an aspiring writer) and John (a photographer who works in various forms of the visual arts). Their love blossoms while John's previous relationship is in its death throes. (That's one way of putting it. Jane doesn't realise what really happened until much later.)

In the beginning, John is a sexual athlete of Olympic standards. Jane receives the alms of his ingenuity in nights of prolonged ecstasy. Until the end of their marriage, she vainly hopes for a restoration of the ecstasy.

The dark spirit enters her marriage when both partners apply for the same scholarship and she gets it. He cunningly begins a long process of dismantling her and their marriage. A child is born. John's behaviour becomes more and more unpredictable. He makes her believe her depression and psychological illness are the cause of everything that happens. When he asks for a divorce, he has been with a new mistress for months. A serial cheater who, like alcoholics, later no longer remembers what lies were told to whom.

Liars' great strength lies in the narrator's voice that Manguso chooses for Jane. John is an almost symbolic figure – a representative of everyone on the patriarchal spectrum who has ever caused the breakup of a marriage. Jane's voice is factual and direct. She suggests a willingness to give the soft answer. She lists everything John does to her without covering up. She does not seek sympathy. She keeps hoping, she wants to protect their child, she tries to rationalise the lies time and again.

The enumeration of John's actions and Jane's inability to see through the lies initially becomes a ruthless countdown of the marriage's destruction. Jane's hatred is never an elephant in the room. It's the room itself. When you finally put the book down, you can hardly breathe.

That's what you need to figure out the title. There is more than one liar, it suggests. Manguso wrote the novel after she had left a gruelling marriage. You can tell yourself she is taking spectacular revenge on her former spouse. But how do you know?

To me, Jane is obviously the other liar – but it's mostly lies she tells herself. Yes, she loves John. No, he did nothing wrong. Anyway, not initially. She's candid about her substance abuse, she's so forthright about her sexuality that you freak out. Nevertheless, it is subordinate to her attempt to be a good mother to their son. In this underpinning of the story lie all the things that make you a powerless, addicted reader of this novel. And then she reaches for the little bottle and swallows another pill.

Liars speaks to humanity as a whole, all the unhappy marriages. The most painful point in the novel is when Jane first wonders why she is still  with John. It is also the moment when you, the reader, wish you could close your eyes to the inhumanity with which people can harm their loved ones. It's a jarring moment, one that will torment your mind for months to come.

Liars by Sarah Manguso was published by Hogarth and costs R359 at Graffiti. 

The kidnapping of a styrofoam tycoon whiplashes through the lives of his children. It's a story of engulfment. To the richly blessed children of the kidnapped (and released) man, the expression “Long Island compromise" initially means  that over time you learn which hole should be used at the right time. Later, when their lives fall apart in laughter, tears and trauma, they learn a different meaning of the term: “That you can be successful under your own steam or you can be a basket case, and whatever you are is determined by the circumstances in which you were born. Your poverty will create a great driving force in your children."

Long live the irony. Long Island Compromise is a sardonic modern comedy of manners, often brutally funny. But after reading Liars, the problems of the rich are trivialities that cannot truly compare to those of people who never have it easy, or live easily with each other. The novel follows Brodesser-Akner's popular Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019) and it's better and funnier than its predecessor. But no cigar.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner was published by Random House and costs R383 at Graffiti.

Just assume that you're going to take up In My Time of Dying again and again, reread certain things. It took me a while to get through it. Junger keeps the attention with all sorts of anecdotes about hair-raising escapades. He is a war correspondent with wide experience in the killing fields of the world – and the smaller playing field of his own life. When that playing field becomes his own body, specifically his vascular system, his narrative diverges to a terrain one doesn't expect.

Junger's story delivers numerous goosebump moments, and one faces the magical side of life. More I don't want to say. Except that if you are in a position to donate blood, do so promptly and regularly. Somewhere on Earth, there are 10 people walking around who don't know this, but they saved Junger's life and made In My Time of Dying possible. The short time Junger was clinically dead is a miracle in the pages of this book.

In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger was published by HarperCollins and costs R470 at Exclusive Books.

♦ VWB ♦

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