Barrelhouse Reviews: The Long Form by Kate Briggs
Reviewed by Emily Alexander
Dorothy Project / October 2023 / 448 pp
In the photo reel on my phone is a picture of a paragraph in Kate Briggs’s The Long Form—a short section titled ALLOW FLOWERS. The page is dog-eared, my left thumb is pressed to the paper; a shadow runs a curved diagonal line through the text. This is one photo in a grid between a screenshot of a black Dansko clog on Amazon and a pile of dinner rolls baked into a droopy flower affixed with googly eyes. There’s a photo of the water damage on my ceiling which I sent to the landlords and there are several Helen Frankenthaler paintings. Another page of The Long Form, featuring a quote by John Dewey—“Lack of room is denial of life…”—which I sent to my friend to validate her decision to pay a lot of money to avoid having a roommate.
Briggs’ first novel follows several translations and a book-length essay, This Little Art. The novel is about a young woman, Helen, moving through the course of a day with her newborn. But to pinpoint this book’s aboutness, or to try, seems antithetical to the slipshod reiterative movements of this work, which expands traditional—often masculinized—ideas of plot, fiction, and purpose. Split into titled chapters, and then shorter, headlined segments, the narrative often reads as a collection of notes, ranging from brief sentences detailing the rain at the park to pages upon pages of literary criticism. But the duration of these notes, their ongoingness, alongside Helen’s ongoing fumbling and refumbling of care, gives the novel its structure. Helen’s new life, contained and domestic, suddenly deeply depended upon, is expressed as perhaps the ideal landscape for the verticality of deep thought. Length, accumulation, tangent, and process as plot. Detail as plot. Consideration as plot.
As Helen and baby Rose pace the apartment, set water boiling for tea, nurse, and watch one another’s constant reorientations, the novel sets out to investigate these actions, their purposes, their repetitions within the pages of a book. Briggs adopts characteristics of the essay as the book shifts between Helen and Rose’s daily housekeeping to philosophical musings in conversation with luminaries such as Gertrude Stein, E.M. Forester, and D.W. Winnicott.
In Drifts, whose themes and scaffolding Briggs echoes in The Long Form, Kate Zambreno writes of her desire to “shrink as small as possible. To write as small as possible. That is the space of my longing, however irrational.” Similarly, Briggs scales her concerns to fit in the bottom floor of an apartment, on a child’s playmat, on the walking path of a nearby park. But like Zambreno, Briggs expands her miniature realms by interrogating physical spaces and those who populate them. Like poking holes in a water balloon, the liquid soon begins to spill out, spreading, dampening—affecting—everything. While the novel takes place in the domestic sphere, Briggs insists on the capability any small space has to burst into new shapes; she grants thought and detail an expansive power in the cramped discomforts of new parenthood.
Early in The Long Form, Helen receives a package (the delivery driver, accursed in the small metropolis of Helen’s apartment for waking the baby, returns several times throughout the novel—these brief shifts in perspective that do not quite become omniscience but allow, instead, for an imagining, the suggestion of interiority without assuming total understanding—a new story that is not the one at hand, that is not Helen’s, that is full of holes; the mysteries other people are and yet, here they are wandering through, and then gone): Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. The delivery of the novel and the novel itself are the first disruptions in Helen and Rose’s contained and containing space. The novel serves as not a guide but, perhaps, a conversation. A conversation about, or around, child-rearing and infants (though it quickly becomes clear that Helen’s experience as a single, middle-class mother is quite at odds with the wealthy Squire Allworthy, who, upon finding a baby at his doorstep, immediately calls for his elderly female servant to “take good care” of it), longevity, the ongoing learning from and laughing at and connecting with people—our constant reconfigurations. “How we all make each other up.”
In addition to Rose, Helen’s other most prominent companion in the novel is Rebba, her best friend and former roommate: “…living with Rebba made her feel part of life.” Helen’s pregnancy prompts a restructuring of their relationship when Helen decides to move out and find her own place for herself and the baby (Rose’s father exists somewhat cryptically in the span of a single chapter. “Dickhead,” Helen mutteringly calls the man whom we assume shortly thereafter she fucks). Their friendship must change; it must make room to include Rose and Rose’s constant vacillating needs; it must encompass greater distances and traverse them.
Upon Rebba’s first visit to Helen in the novel, Helen struggles to explain to Rebba the faraway place in which she has found herself, so particular and distinct from the world Helen and Rebba inhabited together. Rebba’s brief visits, Helen thinks to herself, without accusation or ill-intent, do “almost nothing to smooth the hard angles of our days, the weird loneliness of our wide long nights.” To articulate the perpetuity of care to her best friend, who is not Helen and is not a mother, seems an impossible task.
“Her answer: rephrase it. Repeat herself. Set stories around it, tell stories about it. Keep saying it in different ways.” Briggs’s translation work encourages these new, reiterative modes of telling, of writing. In a conversation with Tracy K. Smith, Briggs describes translation not as the art of replacement—a layering that becomes a concealment of the original—but rather a setting alongside. “It’s something that exists, and still permanently exists, and here is something new that exists.”
Such stuttering, trying articulation exemplifies Briggs’ style. Throughout the novel there are words or phrases that are immediately replaced by alternate ways of expressing the idea. Briggs seems to reject the notion that there is necessarily a right way of saying anything. Instead, her mode of storytelling is a process of trying and trying again, of attempts and corrections, of making room for the unruly somersaulting of all the words it takes to convey an idea from one person to another.
“The novel is the art form that seems to accommodate and withstand interruption,” Briggs says in the Tin House podcast, Between the Covers. “The novels I’m reading or you’re reading now … we’ll go back to them later but in between, we’ve had this conversation, we’ve lived our lives, so what is this art form that seems to understand that it will be cut and withdrawn from in order to be returned to?”
The Long Form, then, resists the notion of reading as a period of sustained focus or unilateral attention, and instead insists on the irreplaceability of life—mundane, frustrating, teeming, repetitive days—for its characters as well as its readers. Briggs makes room for the intellectual and the domestic, the intellect within domesticity. How readily and constantly literature is interrupted by life; or is it life interrupted by literature?
Emily Alexander is from Idaho. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Hobart Pulp, Penn Review, and Conduit, and she has written for The Inlander and LitHub. She works in restaurants and lives in Brooklyn.