The Long Form (Dorothy, a Publishing Project; 2023), the expansive debut novel by essayist and translator Kate Briggs, is as much about new motherhood as it is about the novel as form. Set over the course of a single day, the narrative follows Helen and her baby, Rose, as they engage in simple acts: Rose naps, Helen eats a snack; Rose cries, Helen bends to hold and feed her; the two circle the living room in a kind of bounce; they move to the park, Helen cries, Rose presses against her, and variations of these motions repeat. On the surface, not much happens. And yet, in its attention to the shapes and rhythms of the interplay between Helen and Rose, the book reimagines both this relationship of mother-and-child and the histories and capacities of the novel. In the process, it disrupts these well-worn structures to create something delightfully new.
A lengthy series of short chapters, some as brief as a sentence, The Long Form is technically fiction but often veers toward essay. In this, it resembles a book delivered that morning to Helen’s door, interrupting a coveted moment of calm: The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding, one of the earliest English novels and a long one at that (the Penguin Modern Classics edition runs over 1,000 pages). In the gaps of time Helen can find to read it, we learn that Fielding’s book also moves between forms and that it, too, addresses the subject of child-rearing, at least for a few chapters. But, as Helen muses, whereas Fielding’s protagonist arrives as an orphan without history, speeds through infanthood, and becomes a young hero, in reality babies do come from somewhere, and they exert their own wills before they can walk or speak, even as they depend on a cast of care-giving others. Their existence calls for rearrangement.
What’s it like? wonders Rebba, Helen’s best friend and former roommate, of Helen’s new life after the baby. Why would Helen disrupt the balance of their friendship to have a child? Like many of us, Rebba has her own vision of motherhood, shaped by culture: “like everyone else, she’d seen them acted out on TV and in other media: one or two short scenes standing in for repetition, for interruption, for responsibility. . . .” But here Helen reminds us that as much as we might think we know about motherhood, its realities are nearly impossible to contain. “It would need a new form,” she thinks, “one at least partly defined by length. (By which she meant: Amplitude. Flexibility. A capacity to stretch and make room.)” In this, Helen could be describing Briggs’s book itself. It, too, stretches, as Helen’s jeans stretch, in one scene, around her postpartum waist. In its sequence of short chapters, it holds space for a series of choreographic gestures: see Helen bend to feed the baby, see her lunge, baby in her arms, to lull her. It offers a sense of how life with a newborn might feel.
In this, rhythm matters as much as shape. In one memorable scene, we exit, momentarily, the book’s day-in-a-life realism and dip into the realm of fantasy. Helen imagines bursting into a lecture room where the English novelist E. M. Forster addresses an all-male audience. His topic is time in the novel, how the traditionally linear form depends, for continuity, on “the official, standardized, clock-time sense.” But what about newborns? An exasperated and exhausted time-traveling Helen points to Rose: “If there is such a thing as denial—a categorical refusal to recognize and submit to socially organized, collective, ‘official time’—then here it is.” And later: “Rose SMASHES time.” Rose’s rhythm resets Helen’s rhythm, and The Long Form–with its eddies and flows, repetitions and interruptions–reflects that temporal disruption.
It is a brilliant and subversive move on Briggs’s part to center her own book around a baby, a wordless but consequential force on Helen’s own individualism and strength. And yet, importantly, Rose does not, in reality, smash anything. Instead, her strength is matched and guided by Helen’s, so that the two exist “in sticky contact. One a moving weight. The other its sloped, supporting surface.” In this, they are like parts of the mobile that hangs over Rose’s bassinet and whose shapes are printed in black-and-white throughout the novel. Like the separate but connected pieces of the mobile, mother and child exist in mutual exchange, two forms in wobbling balance.
Their interdependence recalls a scene from Briggs’s book-length essay This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo, 2017)—a meditation on translation, with its own central Helen (Lowe-Porter, first translator into English of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). In that essay, Briggs reflects on an image from Roland Barthes’s lecture series How To Live Together (Columbia University Press, 2012)—which Briggs herself translated—in which he observes a mother dragging her young son by the hand in Luxembourg Garden, too fast, imposing her adult rhythm onto his. Mimicking this scene, at the end of This Little Art Briggs walks home lopsided, one foot on the sidewalk, the other on the pavement below. For her, it’s a reenactment of translation, where no word ever properly meets its foreign counterpart.Her motion also embodies any project where competing rhythms coexist, including motherhood and writing. Defending this plurality, she calls her act one of protest.
In the course of their day together, Helen and Rose also visit a garden, prompting Helen to recall a strange garden sign described by the French writer Jean Paulhan, which read: It is forbidden to enter the park carrying flowers. Paulhan equated such flowers to literary influence and regretted the pressure on young writers to be original, to not carry other authors’ ideas or styles with them. What pleasure, then, to find Helen, rule-breaker, carrying Rose (her flower name not lost) into the garden with her. What delight to see Briggs, in both her books, in dialogue with so many other writers, from Gertrude Stein to Rachel Cusk and Rivka Galchen (many of whom aren’t named in the text itself but listed in lengthy bibliographies). Her project calls to mind Maggie Nelson’s essay on literary influence and collaboration, “A Sort of Leaning Against,” in which she writes: “We literally come into being as a knot of self-reliance and dependence, and so we continue on, each and together, on the page and off it.” Briggs’s novel, with its intertextual references, its mother and child bending towards one another, might be called a novel of leaning.
In this, it offers another form of protest, a call to action. Let us be enacted upon by other bodies—human, nonhuman, literary, all. Let us stretch and lunge, affect one another’s rhythms, converse with cultural histories, interrupt those histories, burst open doors, and, with all the care, softness, and curiosity that any new life might inspire, expand and deepen. As Helen acknowledges about her time with her daughter: “For what are we doing together—if not world-forming?” When Rebba comes over at the end of the novel’s long day, the two friends continue their yearslong conversation, making a new shape, “allowing for Rose.” And when mother and child finally fall asleep, they breathe separately in the same room, each being recomposed.
