It’s useful for a critic to be met, every so often, with a novel that gently, determinedly, requests a purity of care from the person holding it. Kate Briggs’s debut work of fiction is one such novel.
It concerns many things: centrally, a spring day in the lives of Helen and her newborn baby, Rose, after a sleepless night. Their lack of rest affords two modes of attention within the book. Working solely on adrenaline to push through the next 12 hours of childcare, Helen becomes an ontological conduit for the reader, a means of sizing up why the ordinary proceedings of her life (making a cup of tea, taking a walk, reading a novel, putting Rose down on a play mat) should occur; why they have meaning.
In turn, Rose, whose life has just begun, and to whom nothing is ordinary, provides a phenomenological perspective: a restless inventory of the objects, spaces and experiences that constitute her slowly accreting knowledge of the world. The progress of their day is an anchor to the text’s other discursions: a reading of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, and various considerations of the novel form by way of figures such as Gertrude Stein, Ian Watt, John Dewey. This, by extension, also creates a meta-commentary on the book’s own progression, and importance.
Briggs’s greatest achievement would be to move between these propositions harmoniously – and sometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect. At one point, the novel imagines Helen listening to EM Forster’s 1927 lecture Aspects of the Novel in a room full of male Cambridge students, noting Forster’s insistence on the novel’s ability to create social time and, therefore, social order. Helen, sleep-deprived, desperate and holding her child, imagines shouting, “Rose SMASHES time!” and asks: “Do you know what it is like to live without a pattern … subject to the non-rhythm of someone else?” Passages like these interrogate the experience of motherhood, the meaning of the novel form and the potential to break its limits in one fell motion.
At times, this makes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken. But too often, the links between polemic and experience are made excessively clear. Good novels teach their readers how to understand them on their own terms. The Long Form contains too many instances of outright handholding. While Helen reads Tom Jones, for example, the book offers its own description of Fielding’s work and, accordingly, itself: “composed of essay-parts … on-the-page speculation as to what its characters were doing, and why, what other writers and forms of writing were doing, and why, also what it was doing. The novel-as-container which in this interesting case (also) contained its own semi-serious, open programme … for thinking about itself.” This habit is frustrating enough on its own: it’s like having a particularly wonderful magic trick, executed with ingenious lightness of touch, explained to you in the form of an airless monologue.
But more painful is the fact that this leads to insistent preemptions or directions of reader response. Early on, Fielding’s book receives an internet review that deems it “dull as dishwater … tedium punctuated with banalities” – a silent nudge in a novel which seeks to attend to “how a basic action like making something to drink, a sandwich to eat, or getting up in the morning could be elevated”. The Long Form is indubitably the work of a translator: describing and then redescribing banal concepts until they generate greater meaning as a whole is key to how it functions. When this conceit fails (as when a kettle is described, wearisomely, as a “kettle”, and then a “containment of fast-heating water”, and then “a sealed unit [which] works not through compliance but resistance”, and then as a “worldly process” which “abruptly stop[s]”) the book is worse off for its neurotic inability to allow its audience to think as freely as it does; for quashing the very life force it stutteringly, and sometimes luminously, generates.
In her most affecting passage, Briggs speculates on the nature of love. “What if it were much harder to love what is irregular, interruptive, scattered, and uncontained.” I wanted to love The Long Form for those very reasons. Regrettably, it fails too often to meet its own ambitions in conflating “the question of length in writing with the question of continuation of life (how to piece things together; how to negotiate or invent transitions between apparently disparate parts)”. This should have been the last book on earth that left me thinking “It would have been better if it were shorter.” But here we are.
• The Long Form is published by Fitzcarraldo (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
