She marshalls the means of poetry (compression, obliqueness) for essayistic ends, pursuing not the finished thought but the feeling of thinking. Manguso’s method is to break narrative into wisps of inner life and bits of observation. The most significant incidents-a slap, a seduction, a suicide-exist only as rumors, referred to after the fact, and the material that does make it to the page behaves like anti-narrative. Very Cold People is itself a very cold book, with banks of white space piled up around Manguso’s short, accretive paragraphs.
With its adult narrator trying to recover the intuitions of her younger self, Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend. Here, as in many fairy tales, a feeling of magic corresponds to the feeling of the unknown. You half expect the characters to be devoured by wolves. The book’s symmetries, prototypical figures, and brutality heighten the Grimmish mood.
Positive The New Yorker The book has a fairy-tale quality, a ring of the nursery rhyme.
