Kate Briggs, _The Long Form_ (2)

AS NOTED YESTERDAY, The Long Form takes place over the course of a single day, a day that Helen, the principal character, spends looking after her six-week-old daughter, Rose.

This, it seems to me, is relatively unexplored ground in the novel; that is, I can't immediately think of another novel so focused on a mother and a baby. For that matter, mothers and daughters do not have the lengthy history of literary representation that fathers and sons do. The Odyssey, Hamlet, Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, and Infinite Jest are just the tip of the iceberg, and understandably so, since father-and-son-hood is a universal phenomenon that pre-dates literature itself. 

Mother-and-daughter-hood is just as universal and just as ancient, however, yet examples are harder to recall. Sense and Sensibility, perhaps, or Little Women, both excellent books--principally from the daughters' point of view, though. Perhaps it matters that the great women novelists in the English tradition tended not to be mothers: Austen, Eliot, Emily Brontë, Woolf. And the tragic instance of Charlotte Brontë, who did have a child, but did not survive childbirth.

Doris Lessing did have a child, and Anna in The Golden Notebook has a child, but Anna's main attention usually seems directed elsewhere.

A lot of the eerie power of Beloved may come from its breaking new ground on this topic. Circumstances make Sethe's relationships with Beloved and Denver uniquely tormented, but then there's that ice-skating scene.

And then Ducks, Newburyport--unlikely ever to be as widely read as Beloved, but another landmark, perhaps, in its detailed representation of motherhood. 

Recent years have seen a lot of excellent memoirs on giving birth (Elizabeth McCracken, Rivka Galchen, Rachel Zucker, Arielle Greenberg, just off the top of my head), but these tend not to have the granular detail a novel does. 

The Long Form may be the Jeanne Dielmann of taking care of a six-week old. It has the exquisite slowness of David Foster Wallace or the "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses, applied to a hitherto little-written about but utterly ordinary human experience, the clock-defying work of caring for a baby.