Kate Briggs – The Long Form (2023)

 Lately I’ve become a bit enamoured with books published by Fitzcarraldo: the majority are innovative which challenge the notion of literature. Sure there are a couple of readable ones and those are great but the bolder ones fascinate me and The Long form is no exception.

  The book’s writing style is not dissimilar to a documentary – by this I mean that the prose describes actions in a slightly voyeuristic way. In this case the main subjects are Helen and her baby daughter Rose.

   The Long Form focuses on the minutiae of Helen’s life, from the mat she places her baby on to her reaction to the doorbell ringing. One may think that the novel is about spaces in the vein of Nicholson Baker or the slow prose of Simon Okotie and in a way there are those elements but Kate Briggs takes the story to more interesting routes.

  First of all the intense descriptions to not only rely on one room in the house. Slowly things expand and we move on to Helen’s work area to her journeys outside her house.

   Secondly Helen receives a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which is one of the pioneering works of adventurous fiction and this leads to discussions (digressions?) about what constitutes a novel? The book’s title refers to Barthes theory of natural occurrences in novels and that happens here.

  Delving deeper The Long Form is an investigation of what constitutes fiction, when the book itself defies concepts of a novel as well, with its factual descriptions, use of mathematical diagrams and passages about emotions.   

  There are fiction elements as well, Like MFA-style novels Kate Briggs delays certain details about her characters from Rose’s name to her conception. Thus The Long Form is a book which, like Tom Jones, straddles many worlds and ultimately it’s up to the reader to decide what it actually is.

   I like it when novels tease and tickle our brain cells and The Long Form does that, and in a playful way. An adventurous novel should be fun and The Long Form embodies a sense of exuberance.