Reviews

Nicholas Dames

On the exhausted reader

Kate Briggs. The Long Form. Dorothy, 2023.

Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno. Tone. Columbia University Press, 2023.

Every cultural moment has its favorite, iconic reader types, its fantasies that become part of the self-awareness of the actual reader — of you, reading. The lineage is a long one, and you can usually file every new caricature under an old category: Pensive-Thoughtful; Furtive-Masturbatory; Intent (with scholarly and religious subvarieties); Eager-Youthful-Radical. In my own reading over the past year, a new category has seemed to open up: the Exhausted. The almost-burned-out, frayed, fried, edge-of-collapse reader, just barely keeping it together. At the heart of this category, giving it its voice and its avatar, is the mother.

In Kate Briggs’s The Long Form and Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno’s Tone — two works of autotheory that self-describe as fiction and nonfiction, respectively — exhaustion is both the ground for theorizing about reading and theory’s subject. Their protagonist-theorists are mothers of small children out of whose intense but fractured maternal attention arise thoughts not strictly about motherhood itself — or not just that — but about literature and the conditions of our attachment to it. The Long Form is both a novel and a compendium of theories of the novel: it considers how novels take and structure our time, enrich it and kill it; how they address, hail, or estrange a reader; how they hold us, if they do. If you want a précis of decades of thinking about what novels are, you can’t do much better. Tone, somewhat differently, attempts to explore an uncharted part of the literary-theoretical map, the necessarily vague question of how a text sounds, or feels, or evokes — its production of atmospheres, environments, vibes; the outer edges of what can be articulated about the mental models we construct of texts. It, too, is referentially rich, taking from Deleuze and Guattari, Ngai, Koestenbaum, Ahmed, and scores more.

But as much as the ostensible subjects of these books are literary-theoretical, they are also depictions of situations of maternal enervation that function both as premises and embedded arguments. What the books end up compulsively theorizing, really, is reading: particularly the kind of reading, often if not exclusively novel-reading, that motherhood inhibits and inflects. Inhibits: these are books about untenable reading, something like the end of the line of reading’s possibility. Inflects: yet they also explore the moment-to-moment strangeness of reading and its necessity as a surrogate for all the kinds of attachments that motherhood — and maybe other more general cultural conditions — makes less and less viable. At their center is the mother, basically alone, with a book of some kind, trying to read the damn thing. Managing to do it, but with encumbrances.

Samatar and Zambreno’s merged narrative voice in Tone describes reaching for a Heike Geissler galley while “on the perpetual couch, our tit now actually in the mouth of a sick and sleeping baby, the stuffy living area making us both sweaty and shivering.” Briggs, in The Long Form, turns to Henry Fielding: “With Rose in her chair, the mobile entertaining her, the lamp providing its gentle lamp-light, Helen read her novel.” Their reading isn’t exactly furtive, is not at all titillated, and rarely manages to be serenely pensive, but it is aware, and to a large extent aware of what sits right on the edge of their all-too-temporary engrossment, ready to claim them again and pull them out. It’s the old Sadean joke about the kind of reading you do with one hand, but wearily de-eroticized: that other hand is supporting, one way or another, a child’s weight.

The tone of the moment, if you take these books as a guide, is a habitual mordancy.

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The Long Form and Tone embed the reader in a now that the mother’s weary alertness seems to perfectly capture. It’s a place where time feels unendingly sluggish but also full of alarms about to be tripped. Offstage, outside the claustrophobic setting of maternal care, things are going badly: pandemic, climate disorder, fascism. The protagonists make short, often anxious ventures out into that world, but there’s no ability or even reason to stay there for long — back they go, inside, to the tight mother-child dyad. Since they’re not entirely sure they’re safe there either, resentment of their safety offers no charge or emotional release; they think cautiously, hour to hour. Everything feels temporary, from the room (rented) to the furniture (consumer assembled) to the child’s developmental stage (evanescent) to the means of financial support (semester-long teaching gigs, freelance assignments). It’s tiring. They’re tired.