The book comes to life in a way none other has for me — not a thing to be consumed but a force exerting its own energy on me ... Briggs’ voice takes over in the essay portions, and I would have been interested to see them dominate the entire book. In fact The Long Form feels like a novel leaning into an essay. True to the latter form’s intentions, it tries on various narrative styles to grasp at its subject ... Love is the medium of the book, shaping and moving it, opening and deepening it.
Briggs refuses what for most authors would be THE story: how Helen came to be a single mother. There are so many possible plotlines ... But, that is not this story. The deep, abiding love affair here is with Rebba, Helen’s best friend and former roommate ... Her book feels like a manifesto for something distributed, open, radical.
Expansive ... As much about new motherhood as it is about the novel as form ... Rhythm matters as much as shape ... Memorable ... Briggs’s novel, with its intertextual references, its mother and child bending towards one another, might be called a novel of leaning.
It’s useful for a critic to be met, every so often, with a novel that gently, determinedly, requests a purity of care from the person holding it. Kate Briggs’s debut work of fiction is one such novel ... Briggs’s greatest achievement would be to move between...propositions harmoniously – and sometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect ... Interrogate the experience of motherhood, the meaning of the novel form and the potential to break its limits in one fell motion. At times, this makes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken. But too often, the links between polemic and experience are made excessively clear. Good novels teach their readers how to understand them on their own terms. The Long Form contains too many instances of outright handholding ... The book is worse off for its neurotic inability to allow its audience to think as freely as it does; for quashing the very life force it stutteringly, and sometimes luminously, generates ... It fails too often to meet its own ambitions.
A joy ... Certainly a novel, and it makes its own case for the necessity of its fiction better than I ever could ... I was taken back again and again by the richness and empathy of Briggs’ writing, both in exposition and narration.
... takes on the canon of mom-lit with elliptical, philosophical prose ... The Long Form’s avant-garde turn doesn’t always click. I, too, would love a novel to feel like an open house or open container, but at times The Long Form feels almost too full. Instead, when Briggs focuses on the humanity of her character constructs as in a chapter on Helen’s grandma, the novel feels warm and spacious like the very forms she argues for.
The kinetic, poetry-like prose aptly communicates how disorienting and unfamiliar mothering life feels for Helen, and readers are made to share in that experience of newness.
Charming yet formidable ... Briggs has composed a capacious, if diffuse, narrative that makes a very serious game of domesticity, treating both Helen and Rose—in sections written from her perspective—with respect, and successfully reimagining the relationship between reader and writer. Though exacting, this is an appealing consideration of motherhood.
