August 1, 2023
A single mother and her baby daughter move through the course of one day in this debut novel, which cleverly incorporates the woman's past and present relationships and intellectual life. Helen is trying to get her 6-week-old, Rose, to nap. She nearly succeeds, but a delivery wakes the baby up. It's a used edition of Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling that Helen ordered. Time expands and contracts, moves backward and into the minutiae of the present, as Helen and Rose's day continues from here. In particular, Helen returns again and again to her close friendship with her ex-flatmate Rebba, considering how it has changed since Rose was born and Helen moved into her own apartment. She contemplates the act of caring for a child as described in Tom Jones and the nature of time as described by such thinkers as E.M. Forster, Gertrude Stein, and D.W. Winnicott. For Helen, any definition of time is utterly exploded by the fact of her newborn baby's complete lack of a sense of schedule. As Helen's thoughts unspool as she tries to get Rose to sleep in their apartment, while out for a walk, and then back in their apartment again, the reader is given direct insight into a parent's sense of space and time during this often Sisyphean activity. While some readers may be put off by the interweaving of Helen's experiences with mini-essays on the everyday terms and concepts of her intellectual and domestic life, there are imaginative interjections, such as when Helen places herself in a Forster lecture with her baby, that should appeal to Virginia Woolf fans. This don't-miss debut captures the details of early parenthood while engaging with ideas about time and caregiving.
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August 14, 2023
Briggs’s charming yet formidable debut novel (after the story collection This Little Art) merges the chronicle of a young mother and her infant daughter with musings on the nature and possibilities of fiction. Over the course of a spring day, Helen, who lives in an apartment with her baby, Rose, works at taking care of Rose and understanding her new role as a mother. When Helen begins to read Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, her thinking turns to the elasticity of time, both in her own life and in the text. As Helen looks after Rose and herself, she considers writers and psychoanalysts including E.M. Forster and D.W. Winnicott (whose motherhood analysis leaves Helen questioning why “the mother she was supposed to have become” still hasn’t arrived) while reflecting, through a series of flashbacks, on her sustaining friendship with Rebba, her roommate prior to Rose’s birth, and her relationship with her grandmother. In a series of vignettes, interspersed with images referencing the shapes in Rose’s Bruno Munari–inspired mobile, Briggs has composed a capacious, if diffuse, narrative that makes a very serious game of domesticity, treating both Helen and Rose—in sections written from her perspective—with respect, and successfully reimagining the relationship between reader and writer. Though exacting, this is an appealing consideration of motherhood.
September 1, 2023
Through whimsical everyday observations, The Long Form explores how experiences as commonplace as a parent holding their baby wake up human consciousness to the fantastical nature of daily tasks. The protagonist, Helen, is a new mother, and descriptions of her activities over the course of a day are interspersed with close readings of Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, about a foundling, and reflections on theoretical writings by Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, and others. On its face a quirky narrative approach, this patchwork offers fresh, invigorating perspectives on the mundane events of the everyday for a new parent: nursing, sleeping, loving. As its title suggests, the novel focuses on forms: firstly, the silhouettes of daily life that take shape for Helen's daughter, Rose, as she comes into gradual awareness of her world; and secondly, the structures that formulate a novel's temporality. The kinetic, poetry-like prose aptly communicates how disorienting and unfamiliar mothering life feels for Helen, and readers are made to share in that experience of newness.
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