The Brooklyn Rail

While reading Kate Briggs’s novel The Long Form, I visited the Met Cloisters. There, I was inundated by Medieval paintings portraying baby Jesus in Mary’s arms, perpetually clutched to her body. An inseparable bond between a mother and her newborn. The Long Form follows Helen and her baby Rose during one day of their first weeks together as mother and daughter. They coexist inseparably, yet they are only just starting to know each other and still adjusting to each other’s rhythms. Their universe is slowly growing, expanding.

It took a few pages for me to settle into the slow pace of life that the narrator describes Helen and her baby in; to witness every detail in what feels like real time. Simple mundane tasks are met with the most intricate poetry. A package delivered at her door becomes “a cardboard pouch.” The cardboard pouch is, in fact, a book. With this book Helen meditates on “the novel: What was it actually? At first; a beginning. Its own startling sort of start.” Just as Briggs’s novel begins, so does Rose’s life, and we are met with these perpetual starting moments.

The Long Form is also a reminder that in a baby’s early days every minute is a large fraction of the little time she’s spent alive. “For Rose it was like this. The mobile like her sensing of the world: it was near and juddery, gapped with negative space, edgy and alive.” For Helen, who is revealed as a patient mother, curious and observant, she says to Rose “I have known you - sat with you or near you - your whole life.”

Most of the support that Helen receives comes from her close friend, Rebba, who seems to take the form of a partner though it is never explicitly identified this way. Rebba appears and disappears. She knocks on the door, they are folding sheets together, Helen is at times remembering when they were roommates before Rose was born. Rebba is Helen’s closest, and perhaps only friend. During a time of the felt crisis that is early motherhood, however, Helen remembers that her mom would also drop everything and drive over if Helen needed it.

This novel is a reflection on the form of a novel itself. It makes sense that Briggs has spent many years as a translator, notably translating the work of Roland Barthes. I can imagine the time she spent on her own novel, working similarly as she does on her translations, focused on every word, re-reading and purposefully choosing each word. In a sense, “mothering” the book. Tending to it, as she would with translation and as one would with a newborn, in an act of care. Translating is preserving the original message, story, and voice of the author. Through Helen, Briggs describes in length the process and reason of the name Rose, as if it were a detailed etymology. She traces the root of the word back to its origin. Rose’s origin story through language, if you will. Helen is playing God, creating the character who is her baby by assigning her a name, thereby blurring the line between character, narrator, and author. Making each decision transparent to the reader.

Later in the novel, Helen observes that Rose—by waking up in the middle of the night and interrupting her routine by crying or being hungry at odd times—is disturbing the supposed natural rhythm of life, of morning, afternoon, evening. “She is saying to herself: I can see what Rose is proposing. [...] I can hear her asking: Why? Why should this count as a day? Why should this be how we measure, pace, and time ourselves?” Time is a central theme throughout the book. Briggs utilizes the slow pace of the novel to mimic the slow pace of Helen and Rose’s lives, but perhaps she is questioning the supposed structure of a novel (beginning, middle, and end) and finding ways to subvert this notion.

The novel additionally shifts back and forward in time, navigating the narration to when Helen was a baby herself, when Helen was pregnant with Rose, and stories of the other beginning moments in Helen’s life. The language, continuously tender, meditative, and observant. The time that Helen and Rose spend together as mother and child feels infinite. As readers, we only experience a small fraction of it.