IF ANYONE EVER asks me what I think is the best 21st century novel so far, I may well go with this one.
What I wrote about this novel back in December still goes, to wit:
(1) As its title suggests, it is a novel that reflects deeply and insightfully on the form of the novel itself. It connects to the modern novel of a century ago by being set in a single day, like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, and to the novel of two-and-a-half centuries ago through protagonist Helen’s reading of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, another novel that devotes much space to the topic of the form to which it belongs. Briggs knows her narrative theory—she has translated Barthes—and spreads it on generously, but the novel’s frequent infusions of theory never seem pretentious or gratuitous; rather, they are consistently fresh, illuminating, and attuned to fictional context in which they occur.
(2) That The Long Form is interested in what novels do and how they do it feels right because it does something novels have not done with great frequency: depict the relationship of mother and infant daughter. Compared to the father-son relationship, minutely scrutinized in Oedipus, Hamlet, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and a few thousand other classics, the mother-daughter relationship has gone relatively under-described. The undisputed classics (Sense and Sensibility, Little Women) tend to be more from the perspective of the daughters than that of the mother. Morrison’s Beloved and Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood memorably take that perspective, but it’s still a short shelf. The Long Form could be the beginning of a redressing of the balance.
Although The Long Form does briefly and bravely take the perspective of the six-week-old Rose (drawing on some suggestions from D. W. Winnicott), for most of its 400-some pages it adheres closely to the point of view of new mother Helen as she nurses Rose, takes her out to the park in a stroller, assembles a mobile, and performs similar new mother activities. And I kept thinking: why have I never read about this in a novel before? Mothering a newborn is one of humankind’s oldest and most universal activities—why are literary depictions relatively scarce, and why do they leave out as much as they do? As the novel shows again and again, the mother and a newborn are a complex and dynamic world, worthy an epic or two. And in some respects they are even a world sufficient unto themselves—Helen gets some welcome help from friend Rebba, but we never find out who Rose’s father is, and no thought of him crosses Helen’s mind.
(3) The Long Form scarcely has a plot and nimbly demonstrates what a dead weight plot usually is. If, on Helen’s walk with Rose in the park, she notices a strange man, that man does not turn out to be a stalker, or a murderer, or in possession of a flashdrive he is going to pass to a spy or a journalist, or any of the other possibilities engineered to keep people turning pages. In The Long Form, any number of Chekhovian guns never get fired. And is just that fidelity to plain, familiar experience that kept me turning pages, wanting more. The plain and familiar has a fascination and glory all its own, its own revelations and transfigurations, exemplified here by Rose’s first smile.
A big basket of kudos to the Dorothy Project for publishing this and for everything else they do.
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