PositiveFull StopThe enchantment of the story is irretrievable, like the expectation of glamor ... The shadow...Epicureanism casts is long and sweet: watching Lóri live with such vitality, mirrored in the style of Lispector’s prose, is intoxicating ... The novel hurtles towards the question of whether Ulisses and Lóri will ever get together. We readers don’t have to agree to ask it, or care for it being answered. The novel that begins with a comma and ends with a colon offers much more—Lispector’s fiction pushes us to become apprentices of language itself, to find pleasure in the cadences of subjectivity, and to seek out how our articulations of desire and pain weave our reality.
Bette Howland
PositiveFull StopW-3 is not a recognizable form. What does one expect from a memoir about being institutionalized in a psychiatric ward? If there is a singular confession, it is cleverly eased over: yes, a suicide attempt, yes, a note on the method, yes, an insight into the machinery that kicks into action once you survive an attempt in 1960s urban America. But it is not a memoir that confesses to an intimate or spectacular inhabitation of neuroses ... Howland writes around herself: she is ever-present, but more in her steely observations, less so in the facts of her life. She narrates the slow passage of time in the ward, her friendships with the others who live there too, and their wardrobes, moods, families, objections and exits. She is a mesmerizing writer about institutions in general; a quality that is also tended to in the narrative voice she develops in her fiction. She observes life in institutions telescopically, harboring a wryness towards bureaucratic structures and a deep fondness for the people having to navigate them ... Bette Howland’s prose is unsparing, and in her memoir, this manifests as a trick of form ... the memoir, as Howland shows us, need not be instructive. The radicality of W-3 lies there: it is imaginative, as a form, because it is a narrative about the banal, moving contradictions of people who experience madness, and how they experience them.
