The Long Form
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
It's early morning and there's a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she'll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding's proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
