You’d be forgiven if this doesn’t strike you as the making of a great novel. But Dayswork, a spry, compact book by the husband-and-wife team of Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, is quite weird and wonderful, a novel in verse that immediately casts a spell and keeps it going until the last little missive. It’s the kind of book you miss as soon as it’s over, its sway and power nearly as mysterious and unlikely as that of a leviathan tome about whaling ... Vivid ... This is the rhythm of Dayswork, somehow jagged and smooth simultaneously, quotidian and deeply felt, and capable of lulling the reader into a sort of literary trance. It’s a nimble merging of poetry and prose, written by a poet and a novelist in perfect synch.
Brief, illuminating ... It calls itself a novel, but it is also a biography, a work of literary criticism, a poem and a pandemic diary ... Habel and Bachelder’s form works beautifully to at once evoke and hold back the tide of information ... iterary projects often feel long and hopeless, and require dedication and stamina. But there is a loveliness to Dayswork, a spareness, that is in productive tension with the idea of dangerous waters and lunatic missions.
As charming as it is unusual ... Part of the appeal of Dayswork lies in its unclassifiability ... It reads as a clever mash-up of a fictionalized memoir, a meditation on a literary forebear and a portrait of a marriage ... Melville...comes alive in these pages of wry, epigrammatic observations.
The experimental, fragmentary style—and lack of an explicit narrative—is a way of writing about the pandemic without really talking about it ... Clever ... With its fragmentation, plotlessness, and playful exchange of fact and fiction—expressed as a paean to academic research in the age of Google and the pandemic—is a masterful antidote.
Bachelder and Habel have created a curious, heady cocktail of a quarantine novel that feels like a buoyant literary memoir, a surprising and exhilarating inquiry into the pleasures and pitfalls of literature, obsession, collaboration, and love, all relayed with piquant wit and thrilling insight.
