The Long Form
February 27, 2025 — Kate Briggs
Table of Contents
Review
I read this for the small press book club. It’s good! I finished it about 15 minutes from the meeting and so it hasn’t really digested yet. It is 430 pages focusing on, basically, one day in the life of a mother and her tiny baby. This is misleading because there is a great deal of literary history and engagement with ideas of literary writing, time, space, and perception.
I have a lot of tabs throughout the book and I’m too exhausted by this week to go through like I normally would and type them all out. There is some very sweet stuff about love. The feeling of sending a text and having that door hang open until the other person responds, and the feeling of the phone buzzing and you know who it is instantly. This was all very good. Moving. I particularly liked the chapter A NARRATIVE MAKES ITS OWN TIME, but there are others that I liked so much, as well.
At one point the protagonist begins to question the real and or truth of a thing. As someone who thinks about a thing being true a lot, this part spoke to me.
There are other parts where the protagonist is speaking to their close friend, and they are trying to express this feeling, and there are no words for it. The character holds their hands far apart and it is communicated so lovingly. I love that. As literary as this book is (and it spends a lot of time engaging with Tom Jones and EM Forster lectures, so… it’s very literary), it recognizes and even praises that words are mere abstractions for our feelings. Sometimes they just can’t express what is in our hearts. We just hope that those we communicate with can feel a part of what we are feeling, and know that it is true.
This is a short review mostly of episodes in the book. The last I want to recognize is a passage where Helen’s baby, Rose, smiles at her. It is such a powerful moment of jubilation. I found it touching.
I would recommend this to folks looking for a long book that is… Not exactly dense, but easy to submerse yourself in. Especially if you want to have a very approachable entre into some literary history. I didn’t know most of the names mentioned, but I felt like their ideas were communicated and engaged with intelligently and understandably.