[A] sparkling comic novel about art ... [The narrator is] very funny and also a little terrifying: Their brains are nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there ... The conceptual artist believes in the profundity of art — impressively so, since it seems quite possible that she’s never felt it. Like many serious, driven people, she is scared of not being serious or driven enough. Her narration has some of the same endearing stiltedness as the art historian’s, though there are entire paragraphs of The Longcut that are just plain stilted, like a bad Google translation ... Hall is at her sharpest when she’s mocking artsy academic writing, which, luckily, she does lots of ... In the end it’s hard to say whether the narrators achieve enlightenment or false enlightenment — profundity or some shoddy knockoff. Stuffed to the gills with strong convictions, the novels themselves remain cunningly neutral, less manifestoes about what art should be than inkblot tests.
An experimental novella obsessed with questions about the meaning—should any in fact exist—of experimental artwork ... She does her best ... Somehow none of these attempts seem to signify anything artistic. The silliness of the gestures and the absurd recursions of the narrator’s inner monologue give The Longcut a humorous flavor, though it is not the sendup of the contemporary art world that I briefly expected (and, I admit, sort of hoped for). Instead the wheel-spinning resolves in a final crescendo of stirring if desperate affirmations about the creative act, with its constant failures and essential hopefulness. For those few pages, at least, all the pointless frustration suddenly makes sense.
Intelligent if derivative ... Missing is anything that might delineate the character from her high-minded thoughts. It’s an intriguing experiment, but Hall’s straight up approximation of the style associated with the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard goes way beyond mere homage, beginning with the first line...which uses the formula from Woodcutters and The Loser. The result is a frustrating experience that jettisons character and plot, but finds nothing to replace them. Art people might get a kick out of the portrait of an artist obstructed, but as fiction it comes up short.
Surreal, heady, and elliptical, this book reads like a Seinfeld episode if it were co-written by Beckett and Derrida. Unfortunately, much of the wit, trenchant observation, and insight are occluded by the density of the language. This clearly intentional, even integral, stylistic choice is at the heart of the novel’s attempt to elevate even the most utterly banal elements of modern life to the level of 'the work,' and yet it will prove a barrier to all but the most dedicated of readers ... A book that toys with brilliance but falters in the bog of its own telling.
