one of those surprise charmers that initially appears to be microscopically focused yet encompasses its main character’s startlingly intimate, wide-ranging thoughts and feelings—both scholarly and libidinous—about life, love, literature, solitude, self-discipline, physical and intellectual appetites, and more. And it offers a delightfully original take on an age-old philosophical conundrum, the mind-body problem ... Brown’s novel contains a kingdom in its pages, probing nothing less than a reader’s relationship with a text and how to satisfyingly reconcile one’s mind and body.
There’s a genius in the idea of using Shakespeare’s sonnets, which form an exploration of desire deeply and messily concerned with questions of gender and selfhood, to illustrate the complicated process of a young woman figuring out who and what she is ... One of the joys of Brown’s writing, which is often lovely even if it sometimes labors to surprise, is how lightly she lets readers make thematic connections ... Brown appeals specifically to those who have found themselves shaping their own identities around the words of others, and then coming to wonder whether that process has honed their individuality or lessened it.
It works because it doesn’t try to be a bigger story than it is and because it’s concise ... It also works because Brown herself is such a vivid writer ... A refreshing midsummer’s break from the sweeping, socially engaged fiction that understandably dominates our own anxious time. It’s an unapologetically small, inward-looking and, yes, privileged story.
Unsurprisingly, Annabel doesn’t write the essay. But Brown renders what she does do with such rigor and lucidity that the rhythm of her actions become a reflection of Shakespeare’s poems themselves, as well as the sort of fine-grained textual analysis she aspires toward ... Brown skillfully evokes the seemingly arbitrary, indeterminate process by which ideas gradually crystallize ... Everything—literally everything—is imbued with the poetry’s distilled, percipient quality.
The character of the solipsistic, over-earnest, pretentious, self-consciously ascetic Annabel is also brilliantly done ... If Practice has a weakness, it’s that, at heart, it’s rather traditional ... It means something that, despite my fidgeting, I both enjoyed and admired this novel. It was mostly a pleasure to travel in a lonely country most people wouldn’t even call story, to dwell in the satisfactions and strangeness of less when it’s just less.
Elegantly paced ... A feat, a performance of attention, and it is often very funny. But as the novel draws to a close we are left wondering how appealing it is ... Often I felt trapped with Annabel in her narrow room. Where the author fetishizes discipline, she inadvertently cautions against its brittleness and gloom.
While Brown’s skill in turning words is evident, her audacity in composing Practice entirely of Annabel’s thoughts is the book’s greatest vulnerability, as it risks pushing out readers who don’t chime with her. Meanwhile, its context is just as narrowly focused: Annabel is locked into the particularities of the Oxford essay cycle ... Whether its psychological depth and nuance succeeds in opening out into a more general study of the tension between outwardly-lived and interior lives, I’m not wholly convinced.
