I'M READY TO declare this Most Remarkable Novel of 2023. Or Most Interesting, Most Important, Most Worthwhile...take your pick.
"The long form" referred to in the title is the novel itself (as Briggs mentions in a note at the back), a literary form to some extent defined by its page count, so this is a novel that is in part about novels. Not that The Long Form goes in for a lot of metafictional mind-fuckery of a John Barth or David Foster Wallace sort--instead, the narration simply and frequently takes up the topic of the history of the novel and how novels work, with a lot of familiar critical sources cited (e.g., Forster, Bakhtin, Watt). Since the main character is some species of academic, these turns toward the theoretical never seem particularly unrealistic or imposed. Some readers not conversant with Forster, Bakhtin, Watt, et al. may find these excursions tiresome, but the explanations Briggs provides are usually clear, unpretentious, and helpful, not so much lecture-fodder as they are earnest and valuable work on the questions of how novels work and what they do for us.
Briggs's ingenious device for bringing up these questions is to have Helen, the main character of The Long Form, accepting the delivery of and beginning to read a copy of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones--another novel that devotes considerable space to the question of what a novel does. That Briggs does this without getting lost in the funhouse is a feat.
Perhaps even more telling, Briggs sets the novel during the course of a single day, thus joining a tradition of other novels that used that device to dramatically reconfigure the form of novel: Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway being the leading instances. Even more relevant, perhaps, is Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport (2019), but that gets us to topics that will need their own post.
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