A Quick Ring of the Bell: Comparing The Time of the Novel by Lara Mimosa Montes and The Long Form by Kate Briggs
A novel is written, then moves out into the world, escaping containment. In order to write one, however, the writer must delude herself into believing this is not the case. The writing of a novel is, ideally, a zone of tender privacy, of enclosure. It requires hygiene, management, in which the writer and the novel exercise upon each other their petty strictures of control and rebellion, by turns. The reading of a novel, too, requires a private zone of concentration, a walled garden, time enough to have one’s attention captured and held, without interruptions. Novel readers, generally speaking, prize immersiveness; to many of us, the degree to which a novel is able to maintain the illusion of intimacy and privacy with its reader defines its success as a literary object. But novels exist to be read; they offer a strange, hybrid privacy that is ultimately an illusion. Someone had to write it; to publish it, someone else had to read it; and the real world entered the permeable membrane of that novel in all kinds of unaccountable ways, and vice versa.
Two recent novels, Kate Briggs’ The Long Form and Lara Mimosa Montes’ The Time of the Novel, present and problematize this fantasy of literary privacy. Both ask, where is the supposedly bright line that lies between a novel and the real world, between fiction and life, between time and narration, between character and personhood? In doing so, both question to what degree the novel captures reality and to what degree it repels it.
I read the bulk of The Long Form while I was pregnant, took a long break, and then picked it back up when I was a few weeks postpartum and beginning to manage the sleep deprivation and demands of a newborn feeding schedule. Briggs’ protagonist, Helen, is in this same liquid state, where bodies form and re-form after the physical destruction of childbirth, when hormones crash into the brains of both newborn and parent, building the first foundations, wave upon wave, of the strictures/structures of parent-child attachment. It is a bizarrely peaceful kind of chaos, turbulence existing almost simultaneously with utter calm. At least, that’s how it was for me—and all the while, the world outside went along on its strange tracks without me.
The Long Form takes place over the course of a single day. Helen is buried in an unending sequence of small postpartum tasks that are absolutely necessary to keep her and her new baby, Rose, alive and content. Early on in the novel, Rose’s nap—a precious and non-renewable resource—gets interrupted by the delivery of a package. In that package is a copy of Henry Fielding’s 1749 novelThe History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. This is a very long book about a baby of unknown provenance, discovered on a squire’s pillow and brought up in his home, who leaves and eventually discovers his true parentage through a series of misadventures. (Though as Helen notes, quoting D.W. Winnicott, “there is no such thing” as a baby alone on a bed—“a baby alone doesn’t exist.” Briggs writes, “There can be no reality of a baby, no proper understanding of what a baby is—as well as, in real terms, no continued life-time of a baby—outside its relation with/to someone else,” all those who care for it and its parents.) It is this life-shaped narrative, flung by a delivery person onto the front doorstep with a quick ring of the bell, that throws off Helen and Rose’s structure for the rest of the day, requiring all kinds of monumental and mundane responses, culminating in Helen finally getting the baby to sleep by strapping her to her chest and taking her on a long walk. Like the Fielding, The Long Form is a long book, part essay and part novel, and it seems to attempt something like Gertrude Stein’s description of her own work: “there was a groping for using everything.”
The site of drama, for Helen and for us, is the moment of the package’s arrival. It is the moment Helen’s bubble of maternal control—fragile to begin with—collapses. The stakes here are self-consciously low, and yet they come to stand in for a larger anxiety. After the doorbell punctures Rose’s nap and destroys Helen’s morning plans, she considers the safety a total withdrawal from the world might offer. She says,
Let it at least be calm. That is, safe. A safe day. Surely, the basic grounding for any order of ordinary happy. Let nothing happen, in fact. For who cares if it’s boring, as long as it’s undramatic? As long as we get through it (together, intact). “Three in bed, nobody dead.”
It was just a doorbell, but with it came danger, death, the outside world, and the unpredictable. All of these have entered Helen and Rose’s realm of possibility.
After a moment in this vein, Helen rallies, grasping for a solution. She turns toward language: “I could just put a note on it, she thought… A sticky note above the doorbell saying: hi, hello. In big letters: PLEASE—don’t ring. Just tap on the window. I’d hear you.” If she can’t have perfect isolation, perhaps she can have perfect communication. But the outside world, narrative in hand—that is, unexpected situation, conflict, character, and time—always rings the bell eventually.
Lara Mimosa Montes’ The Time of the Novel appears, at first glance, the opposite of The Long Form. It is perhaps a fifth of the size. It does not have much to do with the slow passage of a day, traversing instead a squishy span of time that stretches at least several weeks, and possibly much more. But The Time of the Novel is also interested in sequestration, in the process of creation, and in the boundary between literature and life. In The Time of the Novel, we meet an unnamed narrator who tells us she intends to abandon her life and world in order to become a narrator. She looked to “the narrators [she] liked most,” and found there a set of rules for living according to the strictures of literature: for instance, a “determin[ation] not to work a real job.” There is humor here, but things are serious: we’re told she embarks on this path as an alternative to “ending [her] life prematurely.” She tells us she cannot continue to live as “a person, one with a social security number, a natal chart, an undecided future, and a passport,” and rents an empty apartment to perform her experiment. Her solution is a “monastic… fantasy,” the “noble pursuit” of “uninterrupted interiority.” Being a person, after all, involves having a body, being perceived, and being embedded in capitalism, in state structures, in a gendered and raced subjecthood. Being a narrator, on the other hand, involves having thoughts, endless time, some space, and little else. “What is the difference between the time of the novel and the time of the world?” she asks. “I postpone the novel to be in the world. I cannot postpone the world to be in the novel. Where do you live when you don’t want to live in the world?”
But in both Briggs’ and Mimosa Montes’ novels, neither protagonist can exercise full narrative control over their world, try as they might. The unnamed narrator of The Time of the Novel dreams a doomed dream: a mind without a body, a body without a world. She speculates that to enter the time of the novel might be a way to “stop suffering.” To stop the suffering of others, or to stop her own suffering—she doesn’t clarify. Perhaps a fantasy of escape does not draw a distinction between the two; neither, after all, are promises fiction can deliver. What she does not immediately realize is that narrative demands event and character, and no literature can be conceived without a body or a world. Mimosa Montes’ narrator dryly admits she “habitually turn[s] away from the more graphic spectrums of experience… and I saw this would create problems for me in terms of participating in something resembling narrative.” Does the novel, then, require suffering?
If we believe Mimosa Montes’ narrator, perhaps being a person in the world is the opposite of “uninterrupted interiority”—something like an interrupted exteriority. Fantasies of a certain kind of peaceful, intellectual seclusion carry associations of white, patriarchal luxury, (Mimosa Montes’ narrator’s “noble pursuit”) which neither she nor Helen can adopt. Ultimately, both come to reject those fantasies. Mimosa Montes’ narrator says, “to enter the now of this writing, I would need to remove some part of the facade. I imagined my very face the cost.” This fantasy of escapism appeals, but to fall into it would be another kind of death.
Both Briggs and Mimosa Montes certainly take this idealized interiority as their subject, noting its attractive promises of unending time, as well as its structural impossibilities and failures—in particular, the points at which the outside world interrupts it. But it’s not a one-way street: in both The Time of the Novel and The Long Form, real life and fiction interrupt each other. They seem to promise overlap, perhaps even perfect overlap; and then, abruptly, they fall apart, incongruous. Lyn Hejinian wrote about this problem in her own life-writing: “Existence, entailing unending change, and completeness, entailing a finish to change, are incompatible conditions.” [1] Books are not life; living is not literature. Both novels seek to draw life and narrative closer, while also colliding with their irreconcilability.
About halfway through The Long Form, Helen imagines crashing an E.M. Forster lecture on the subject of time in fiction. He argues that a fiction writer cannot “do without time”— though, he pauses, such a thing “might be possible in life.” Sequences, time’s march, the way a day feels different from a night; without this time-sense, the novel is nowhen. As the clock runs, narrative events erupt along the way, adding a perpendicular kind of intensity. This systematic argument prompts Helen to stand up, indignant, in the imagined historical lecture hall Forster’s essay was first delivered in. She interrupts, presenting her baby as counter-evidence. “Rose SMASHES time! She fucking smashes it.” She says: “I know time. I know time differently now. I know it because I am unlearning it…I know it because the baby is teaching me that the rhythms of the clock and the calendar, and even the most elemental diurnal patterns—they don’t go without saying: they are acquired, if not violently imposed.” Yet after a moment, Helen admits, “I can see what Rose is proposing… [but] I can’t take it up… Not without colossal, life-or-death risk to [my] own… intelligibility.” One painful aspect of the newborn phase is the irreconcilable clock between baby and parent. The baby doesn’t know the difference between night and day, and must feed around the clock; the parent learned in their own babyhood to adjust to the patterns of night and day, and must teach their baby the same structure. To become intelligible, to become a narrator; is this the project of aging? Every human enters the world an alien to time. Every adult who cares for a newborn collides with the realization that, as adults, they are now fully acculturated to time’s strictures, and cannot so easily revert to their old selves. The baby Rose, who is undergoing changes so rapid they are nearly impossible to perceive, is pure narrative, all progression and conflict. Yet it is a narrative Helen can’t quite read, a language she has forgotten how to speak. Life-time and narrative-time split apart.
Mimosa Montes’ narrator, by contrast, desperately seeks that kind of clean break between life and narrative. But she can never quite achieve that perfect separation, as Helen cannot achieve a perfect integration. She cannot transform herself from a body into a text. The time of the novel does not stop, and does not stop suffering. She writes, “As I understood it, the only task of a narrator was to spell the story as it unfolded. I underestimated what this would entail, for I did not anticipate I would occasionally need to pause, to notice the world, if not also my place in it.” She eventually abandons her dream of becoming a narrator, in a poignant turning back toward the grief and beauty of the world.
It should be noted this abandonment is never total. In writing this review, I laughed as I wrote sentences like “an unnamed narrator seeks to become a narrator.” Lest we forget, the narrator of Mimosa Montes’ novel has already been a narrator all along! The Time of the Novel, in this way, winks at a metafictional tradition as old as Quixote. Just as Cervantes’ novel, being one, can never denounce novels, Mimosa Montes’ novel can never truly renounce either life or narration, being made of it.
Both The Long Form and The Time of the Novel are brilliant propositions, astounding and surprising offerings of feminist experimental literature. Both Mimosa Montes and Briggs explore and refuse to resolve the ways that being a woman, being a novelist, being a parent, and indeed being a person, is a negotiation of interior and exterior, fantasy and reality, privacy and public life. How to write about this, followed by this? They both ask. Is capture possible? If solitude is not possible, how does one encounter literature, and how does one make it? Mimosa Montes’ narrator says, near the end of the book: “I know I’m in fiction because when I look at the tomatoes, I see they are less firm than they were when I first purchased them. Time had passed… Apparently, I was not done grieving.” Perhaps that is the truth hidden in literature’s fantasy of withdrawal: the world cannot bear being escaped from. It is preserved on every page. The tomatoes, carried across the threshold and resting in a bowl on the table, continue to decay. The baby breathes, coos, has not yet learned to walk. For now, and for as long as the words on the page exist, they are “so beautiful.”
Works Cited
[1] Hejinian, Lyn. “What’s Missing From My Life” in Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday, p. 117. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2023.
