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
What does it mean in our culture to lose a friend? Can the loss be as deeply felt? If they loved each other, were they not lovers? Manguso addresses this immediately, boldly, bodily.Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times
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
Memoirs about grief often concern a relative or partner, but Manguso’s offers a revealing perspective on simple friendships. Although working within a modest scope, she has created a form to encompass the way life passes: plodding, breathless, and unrelenting.The New Yorker
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
In prose that singes with precision and honesty… Manguso captures with great delicacy the spinning compass of her grief, and its accompanying jumble of anger, disappointments, corrupted memories—and love: “There you are, walking out of the fire in a form you no longer recognize.”Megan O’Grady, Vogue
Manguso is a deliberate and exact stylist… At her best, she has some of Didion’s rhythms, her watchfulness and remove, her way of drawing attention to her own fragility… It is finally a fiercely personal book.Parul Sehgal, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“I tried so hard not to notice Harris’s death…” Manguso writes. “Time eroded the memory of it even as it gathered the dust of what’s happened since. But I need to remember it now so I can see that he really is dead.” And Manguso does see her way here, artfully and with heart.Elle
Manguso’s writing manages, in carefully honed bursts of pointed, poetic observation, to transcend the darkness and turn it into something beautiful. The results are also deeply instructive, not in the manner we’ve come to fatuously call “self-help” but in the way that good literature expands and illuminates our realm of experience.Heller McAlpin, Barnes and Noble Review
Ghostlike, Harris haunts theses pages, but from a distance. Gradually, Manguso twists the knob and Harris magically comes into focus… Her strength as a memoirist places her alongside Didion and Karr. These aren’t merely essayists, but chroniclers of emotional intimacy.Josh Zaidman, Bookslut
What can a writer do? … The Guardians is a portrait of a friendship, before, after, during. Manguso has made something indelible, which is what, I think, she set out to do.Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Manguso not only understands, she can articulate it in the precisest and most unexpected of images—an unrelated car accident, a bowl of Italian candies, a swim in the ocean. What results is a memoir that reveals not the just intimacies of the writer’s life, but of your own. Most moving is that The Guardians covers a subject so rarely recognized in our society, the grief from the death of a friend.Leigh Newman, Oprah.com
Part Joan Didion and part John Donne, Manguso has the rare ability to devastate and illuminate with a single sentence. In just over 100 coruscating pages, she seems to tell all that could possibly be told about the intersection of her life with Harris’s, and the spiritual forces that that intersection created.Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast
The Guardians succeeds as both a eulogy and a genre-less book… Manguso, who has previously written memoir, short stories, and poetry, here combines all three. She remembers Harris, she remembers herself, she makes up stories to fill narrative gaps in her friend’s life. And when all else fails, she avails herself of verse.Alice Gregory, The Boston Globe
Manguso ponders how in spite of similar mental afflictions, she survived and Harris did not… The Guardians is slim, but its effect isn’t slight. It packs an emotional wallop into small, patterned movements.Kevin McFarland, The A.V. Club
Drawing on her talent as a poet, Manguso evokes her friend not by chronicling his life as a journalist would, but by approaching it as an abstract artist and painting a picture of a deep friendship.Elizabeth Taylor, The Chicago Tribune
Manguso asks, if the grief involved is inescapable, what’s the use in running? She sheds her fear of death and in doing so has scribed a fearless work. When she asks the question, “What is grief for?” she offers a number of explanations, the most persuasive of which is this: “Love abides. There is no other solace.”Allen Johnson, The Columbia Spectator
Manguso’s anger simmers in her clear, blunt sentences. The narrative unveils its own anxieties piece by piece, thereby underscoring its necessity. Its authenticity is unmistakable. The Guardians is utterly loyal to its own fearful, selfish, compulsory brilliance.Ron Slate, On the Seawall
Both in its ruminations on suicide and in its attention to the experience of grief, the organization of The Guardians reflects Manguso’s sustained commitment to an unmediated accuracy… In this exceptional book, Manguso’s embrace of rhetorical failure allows her to achieve an elegy which mourns and moves entirely on its own terms; a strange, and deeply involving, lament.Alice Whitwham, The Coffin Factory
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
