... a kind of inverted mindfulness exercise in book form, fixed on pinning moments down like so many butterflies. Zambreno has abstained from the novelist’s traditional task of keeping a story arc aloft ... If this sounds like veiled criticism, it isn’t, though it probably should be taken as a warning to anyone hungry for more conventional fare. But for readers in the mood for an adventure, this is a giddily enjoyable read, emotionally conspiratorial in tone, full of brilliant critical observations and realistic depictions of the dramas in a modern artist’s daily life, the small ones as well as the life-altering ones.
Kate Zambreno’s new novel...was not written with a pandemic in mind, of course. But the pandemic might be the best context in which to read it. An autofictional portrayal of stasis, indecision, and the difficulty of living in a civilization that seems to have passed its expiration date some years previously, the novel already exists in a hazy state of self-isolation. Reading it now, you don’t have to be a published writer or an adjunct professor to identify deeply with the author-narrator as she works from home eternally supine, wanders the confines of her neighborhood, takes photographs of her dog, watches YouTube videos, and tries to figure out if creating anything is possible. This spiky book, with its fragmented prose and Sebaldian black-and-white photos, has become unexpectedly relatable ... maintains a gentle and yet compulsive flow, like the autoplay of the next Netflix episode. As Zambreno writes, 'Drifts is my fantasy of a memoir about nothing.' ... Part diary and part Künstlerroman, Drifts skips around, swapping one subject for the next when a thought trails off, when attention or concentration flags ... There’s an improvisatory quality to the text, like a wet-painted brushstroke ... As intricate and finely tuned as this kind of writing is, it runs up against its limits fairly quickly .. The book’s limited perspective makes Drifts claustrophobic, a claustrophobia that is part of the effect but can be frustrating nonetheless. .
Zambreno draws on autobiography but never leans on it. Her narrators are prone to quoting Barthes or Sontag or deconstructing art-house cinema, but her sentences are always airy and streamlined, full of wit and candor ... I enjoy and admire Zambreno’s work so much that I resisted accepting that there is a flaw in this book: The structure of the narrative suggests that childbirth is the answer to every question she’s been asking, a necessary redemption from her existential woes ... I would have welcomed a portrait of the mother masturbating herself into a Walser-y stupor between diaper changes, but I’m a little baffled that a book suspicious of tidy narratives seems to conclude on the healing powers of childbearing. Still, other readers may be reassured by the suggestion: that an artist will always be dissatisfied with her output, but parents will be enraptured with theirs.
... a novel of notes, scenes, scents, fleeting feelings, emotions, fears—of small waves coming into shore, again and again ... It is thrilling to see Zambreno at such a creative peak, and to now apply the tools she has perfected since her debut to the novel form. What is rendered, like her previous fiction and nonfiction, is a work that is hypnotic and contemplative, a magnetic novel that both surprises and puts us in a trance ... Drifts is at its most interesting when the narrator cuts open her desires for her writing, allowing the novel to become a body to be autopsied, writely desires located and excised ... Zambreno at her most vulnerable ... Drifts is both of the moment, and perhaps timeless: a fitting novel to read in our current quarantine, and in those to come.
...unspools as coolly as ribbon in the wind ... As different times, texts, and experiences continue to accumulate in Zambreno’s controlled and well-paced collage, the past seems ever more present, and the future ever closer to touch ... her narrator’s ambition, and literary and artistic attentions, provide the critic with a ready-made template for assessing her own work. Passages devoted to Hardwick or Kafka flow with impressive ease into those portraying the narrator’s intimate struggles to live and make a living from her art, the minutiae and mundanity and embarrassing moments all given equal weight and measure. By elevating the status of the fragment, then restricting the fragment to its most minimal form—dead time, blank space: nothing—Zambreno empties her text and revels in the resultant openness: the opportunity to ruminate, to record, to connect a disparate set of influences and ephemera, in prose that provokes without need of plot. 'Art for me is a way to remark upon solitude,' writes the narrator. 'A way to mark time.' Likewise for Zambreno, whose avowed 'worklessness' undergirds this abundantly productive and imaginative work.
We are, of course, in that new-found land called autofiction, but Drifts is different in a crucial way from such celebrated examples of the genre as Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Ben Lerner’s 10:04. However much those books blur into memoir, they are stylized and arranged so as to give them literary autonomy. One can just read them, knowing nothing of their authors. This isn’t so with Ms. Zambreno’s 'nervous and diaristic text,' whose sketchy, unfinished nature emphasizes the faltering process rather than the end product. It can only be appreciated as an accessory to Ms. Zambreno’s larger and ongoing public performance of being a writer...This accounts for its overwhelming mood of ambivalence. A book that drifts, that never arrives at a vision or resolves upon a point of view, that is simply a journal of the various and contradictory things that a person feels and does from day to day, is fated to spend its time waffling over countless artistic dilemmas...but of the writing, which sometimes seeks to be fragmentary and poetic and at other times is confessional and expulsive, dispatched in hurried summaries ... The nullifying force of self-actualization lies behind these inconsistencies. If the author’s struggle counts for more than what she actually writes, distinctions of quality are flattened into irrelevance—and by extension, reading the book becomes a bizarrely passive experience, virtually the same as not having read it. Ms. Zambreno may like the idea of eschewing 'salable physical objects'—of writing as a means of purely private expression—but Drifts has a bar code on it, nevertheless. Ambivalence is human, as are confusion, tedium and failure. But art is more than a transcription of life, thank God, or else we’d have no need for it.
In her newest book, which is marketed as a novel but reads more as a genre-defying diary of everyday textures, Zambreno provides some insight into her watching and viewing process ... not so much renders the question of genre irrelevant but charts the search for a new genre, a search that Zambreno has been pursuing her whole career ... no less dependent on the rhythms by which fragments of language both intersect with each other and behave internally ... fits in with the popular subgenre of autofiction. But Zambreno’s is an example of a very different type ... a refusal of old forms that cannot wholly dispense with them, a diary of daily textures that inscribes the self even as it attempts to transcend it. It is also many other things: an intellectual autobiography, a consideration of the art/life dichotomy, a compendium of gentle literary gossip. In the end, it is a chronicle of what it feels like to be a specific person in a specific set of circumstances, a chronicle of what it’s like to think through those circumstances in a specific way. While this may diverge significantly from the goals of the novelistic form that her publishers expect her to follow, it is the exact ambition of the evolving genre-curious/nongenre that Zambreno continues to push forward with each new book, never more effectively than in this latest volume.
Zambreno is a writer who doesn’t sit comfortably in one genre, but blurs the boundaries and makes the reader question why they have to exist in the first place ... a book that has the intimacy of a private notebook fused with the intellectual rigor of a brilliant mind ... This way of wandering through the author’s psyche is both dizzying and intimate, mapping her desires and her despair ... With the melancholic splendor of its prose, Drifts is the perfect book for the moment we’re living in; most of us feel some sense of isolation and heaviness as we stumble our way through the uniformity but instability of our days, and time seems to fold in on itself ... a stunning book that shows how life can be pregnant with possibility, even and especially when we feel isolated. All we have to do is pay attention.
... not much in the way of plot. That the narrator is pregnant might prime readers for a motherhood novel—which it is, in a fashion—but the book is not especially interested in that. Instead, the text is more concerned with recounting its own birth ... This hand-wringing exhausts the goodwill of the reader; the fact of the book we are reading belies the text’s hesitations and apologies. To make something 'paper-thin' (a nice phrase) is not an unworthy end. But Zambreno’s self-consciousness about this desire feels at first absurd—why write in this manner if it occasions such doubt?—and then, more pages having passed, nearer a provocation ... this is a novel about means, not ends; process, not payoff. This was, for me, its principal frustration. Art about the creation of art can charm and surprise, but Drifts too often reiterates its vaunted aspiration and laments its inability to achieve it. Artistic creation has its drama, but it’s expressed here as self-doubt, inaction, excuses. The stakes are far higher for the writer than they ever are for the reader ... Perhaps Drifts’ lack of success can be attributed to the fact that the author intends not to capture the energy of thought but to transcribe her own thoughts. There’s no attempt to construct character or scene to provide the reader that sense of immersion into another reality; it’s nearer a catalogue of the writer’s fancies ... It mostly withholds the surprise of language. It wants to engage us by laying bare the writer’s consciousness, but I felt my attention drift.
Much transpires here, from the frightening to the ludicrous to the profound. Zambreno is perceptive, funny, and spellbinding as she reflects on and dramatizes the infinite complexities of womanhood and creativity.
A book about nothing is often a book about everything, and this text– whatever it may be - is concerned with the act of writing and living, of time and stasis ... Structurally the book is a tornado, a whirling, kinetic funnel carrying art, philosophers, dogs, paintings and trains within it ... In a book as elliptical as this one, there are two certainties which the narrator can’t escape from: the submission of her book, and the due date of her unexpected pregnancy. The latter takes up the final part, in a series of stunning and urgent vignettes, which themselves twist time, altering the pace and rhythm of the book ... Zambreno’s previous work, from Heroines to Book of Mutter, has always been interested in embodiment, gender and who gets to make a creative life. With each book, she becomes more expansive, sharper in her insight, each time picking something new off the bones of familiar subjects ... with all its accumulations, this feels like a book that should be read now. It has its own kind of geographic quarantine – pacing the rooms at home, the mundanity of daily routines and commitments – that in small increments amounts to a tender and contemplative account of artistic paralysis ... presents a new possibility for the novel. There is nothing that can’t be included, and even the most ordinary of objects or encounters build towards a greater understanding of existence ... a risky, reflective work that refuses to conform – to time or traditional narrative. It is difficult to make a book about the quotidian – not every reader will equate its dives into the minutiae as insight - but in these current uncertain times it offers illumination and solidarity.
A free-spirited, essayistic novel exploring the complex links among art, parenthood, and making a living ... Zambreno holds the reader thanks to the punchy, brief paragraphs and her quirky, gemlike sentences ... Zambreno harbors no easy platitudes about how motherhood gives women a sense of purpose ... The charm of this novel is how it makes this deep uncertainty feel palpable and affecting; its fragmentary nature is a feature, not a bug. Adrift, the narrator engagingly tangles with everything from the Kardashians to Joseph Cornell for a sense of fellow-feeling ... A lyrical, fragmentary, and heartfelt story about the beauty and difficulty of artistic isolation.
...[an] immersive, exciting experiment in autofiction ... Zambreno offers an enticing chronicle of how a book might actually be written—dramatizing how a writer’s work affects her life, and vice versa—filled with small moments of magic ... Zambreno succeeds at capturing her narrator’s experience of time and the unavoidable transformations it brings. The result is a captivating deconstruction of the writer’s process that will reward readers in search for meaning.
