The Guardians
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012
About the book
The Guardians opens with a story from the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press that begins, “An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the station on West 254th Street.” Sarah Manguso writes: “The train’s engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train’s 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.”
The Guardians is an elegy for Manguso’s friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under that train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Manguso’s fellowship year in Rome, Harris’s death and the year that followed—the year of mourning and the year of Manguso’s marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harris’s presence in and absence from Manguso’s life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship. The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.
Reviews
In The Guardians, Manguso holds up two kinds of love: the love for someone willfully at one’s side (the new husband) and the love for someone willfully gone (the dear friend, a suicide). The limitations and complexities of romantic love played out in the present are here haunted on all sides by the simple expansiveness of platonic love, especially as seen through the lens of mourning. The living cannot compete with the dead. But marriage has its rights before any friendship. The mystery of where Manguso’s heart will land propels us through this vivid meditation.Sheila Heti
Sarah Manguso’s is a disarming and yet infectiously charming style, one that mixes intimate personal reflection with curiously distanced observations of the world. What this ends up feeling like while reading The Guardians is a tension that’s both inviting and simultaneously alienating, a wounded sort of intellect that wants to protect and yet expose itself to the reader. It’s a beautifully sad meditation—as exhilarating as it is devastating.John D’Agata
In the case of some other book, it might be a criticism to observe that the author’s private language has only been partially translated into a meaningful idiom, but here it represents the book’s most distinctive stylistic achievement: Manguso’s embrace of rhetorical failure itself constitutes an unusual and strangely affecting lament.Jenny Davidson, Bookforum
The Guardians majors in bone-on-bone rawness, exposed nerve endings. It always points simultaneously outward and inward: outward toward Manguso’s friend Harris, who on page 1 commits suicide; inward toward herself (she’s “dead” now, too). With The Guardians, I did something I do when I love a book: start covering my mouth when I read. This is very pure and elemental; I wanted nothing coming between me and the page.David Shields, The Los Angeles Review of Books
