What is Life Like?

The Long Form 

by Kate Briggs

"But what is life like, really? The necessary, pressing, open question. And for whom? Questions that the novel, through its descriptions, the sharing out of its attention, both answers and asks." - Kate Briggs, The Long Form







The Long Form, which Briggs refers to as the "essay parts," is partially a reaction to Tom Jones and adopts a similar format that breaks up fictional narrative with expansive nonfiction passages. She also uses all caps with the lavishness of a novel from the eighteenth century; in one passage alone, the word "love" appears numerous times. Thus, it presents the novel form as it has rarely been presented before, with a lengthy series of short chapters, some as brief as a sentence. It is ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant. It does this through its recursive structure, subtle connections and reverberations, attention to physical and social life, and lively conversation with other works of fiction and theory.

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. In the gaps of time Helen can find to read it, we learn that Fielding’s novel 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. I found the style worked for a time, but it made it difficult to maintain interest in the whole book.