The Longcut
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn’t know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she’ll know it when she sees it.
Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a “completed” column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions—what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue—that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters.
An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art critic Hall debuts with the intelligent if derivative story of a young artist on a circuitous path both mentally and spatially. The unnamed narrator gets lost in increasingly recursive thoughts about her inchoate art practice while on her way back from lunch to a soul-deadening admin job. She's also preoccupied by a friend and fellow artist whose career is doing better. At the moment, the narrator's only idea for her work is a decorative egg she plans to photograph. She also ruminates on the color blue, the inscrutable passing of time, Wallace Stevens, Argentina, syntax, her pocket-size cassette recorder, whether jewelry is art, and so on. Notably missing is anything that might delineate the character from her high-minded thoughts. It's an intriguing experiment, but Hall's straight up approximation of the style associated with the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard goes way beyond mere homage, beginning with the first line ("I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery"), which uses the formula from Woodcutters and The Loser. The result is a frustrating experience that jettisons character and plot, but finds nothing to replace them. Art people might get a kick out of the portrait of an artist obstructed, but as fiction it comes up short.
