The Brooklyn Rail

The written word is having a moment. Substacks proliferate my inbox, bookstores are resurging throughout the city, print-only magazines are back in circulation. But some days, the sudden accumulation of writing has left literature feeling dull, less engaged. It has left me “wordsick,” to borrow a term from Lara Mimosa Montes’s new book, The Time of the Novel, wanting writing to do more.

Spurred by a feeling of disillusionment and formlessness, the unnamed female protagonist of The Time of the Novel seeks a pause—an “extended hiatus,” during which she might remake herself. To do so, she decides to step back from real life and enter into fiction as a narrator. A simple idea on the surface, but one that, as we learn, requires a good deal of preparation: quitting a day job, moving to an apartment furnished with others’ things, stopping the mail, shutting off telephone service. “My new pursuit required silence,” she explains, “how could I be entrusted with describing this weird slow unfolding if I continued to let in the world’s constant interruptions? I did not wish to practice ‘setting better boundaries.’” To narrate, we are reminded, is always a choice. There is always something left behind.

Reading The Time of the Novel can feel disorienting, in part because the act of narration is never as linear as it seems. “Literature, what it imparts on the Real, does alter something in the time-fabric of the world by being written.” In a state of reflection, timelines often go askew. Here, we are in a meta-space as readers, experiencing a past attempt of someone to stay as close to the present as possible while acting as a transparent observer with an inevitable point of view. The narrator asks, “How can I show you what is to the left of you by describing what’s inside of me?” Our guideposts of time and place are destabilized in Montes’s writing, and words become slippery. There were several times I misread “word” for “world” or vice versa, and it didn’t feel accidental—it felt like unlocking a code.

It is no surprise that Montes is also a poet. Her previous books, Thresholes and The Somnambulist, move fluidly through genres including poetry, memoir, geography, and essay. In The Time of the Novel, her prose sings with gorgeous and surreal imagery: a rabbit with horns, a tongue without a body, an inverse Pinocchio. But she does not leave us in the ether. We are given a plot and visceral details that remind us our narrator is a body as well as a mind, and the ability to transcend these is what gives fiction its alluring power.

There’s a growing body of fiction that features female protagonists who find themselves, whether intentionally or by chance, in a form of mental and sometimes physical solitude: Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Natasha Brown’s Assembly, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, Ariane Koch’s Overstaying. The gulf opened up by solitude allows for a transcendence of traditional narrative. We are presented with the lush interiority of each narrator as they break from society, a break often communicated in cyclical, philosophical language. While the desire for time and space is genderless, it has historically been a luxury less afforded to women. It wasn’t that long ago this type of break in a female character would be considered irresponsible or hysterical. This is what makes it so exciting to encounter as a reader now. We are in the realm of the flâneur—the unhurried observer—and it’s decadent in all the right ways. It is in this space of the pause that Montes’s writing shines:

I was never sure what one sentence might invite by way of proceeding another, as if I might pull an idea out from the void. I was willing to disappear in search of the idea so that my imagination might seize upon something it almost forgot. And I was not afraid to stand in the purple light of the sky because sometimes it was.

Other writers have used the space created by solitude to examine themes like motherhood, sexuality, trauma, race, and spirituality. The Time of the Novel adds to this conversation by bringing us to the door of art, including but not limited to Literature with a capital “L.” Montes makes a case for art as a space where existing and reflecting are in constant tension. It is a luxury to study the self, but it is also a burden; a task that is never complete.

The Time of the Novel presents a work that is equal parts manifesto, thought experiment, and antidote to the general malaise plaguing the written word. Good writing reminds us that it’s okay to want more from less. Having ample opportunities to be doused in writing these days, I now want to be remade through my reading. I want language to be put to work. I want fiction that sees me without knowing me. The narrative ambitions in Montes’s novel give us permission to ask for these things. But first, we must make the time.