The Long Form

The Long Form is also an exhilarating experiment in form, an examination of the function of time in the novel, which includes an irresistible graphic element that punctuates the narrative & helps to conjure the stagelike setting occupied by the maternal dyad. Briggs invokes E. M. Forster—“Every novel needs a clock”—& indeed her novel’s timepiece has us on the edge of our seat, turning the pages in anticipation. I finished The Long Form & started again from the beginning; I wanted to understand how this miracle of a book had come to be; I was not ready to let go.—Moyra Davey, Paris Review 

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Helen & her young baby, Rose, are spending a regular morning together. They move, they rest, they communicate; Rose feeds. Thoughts & associations travel far beyond the remit of the front room in their rental flat, which they pace, & which, alive with them, continually becomes new: house plants shift, mountains of condensation form & then break down within the window panes, memories dance. 

Their delicate balance is interrupted by a delivery: the arrival of a novel, 1 of the oldest in the English-language: A History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. As the day progresses, Helen begins to read Tom Jones, a book which describes itself as inventing the novel for the 1st time, though many of its passages have the qualities of an essay, inviting a grappling with the novel form & its endless, constantly evolving modes. 

The Long Form is a radical reappraisal of our interdependence & connectedness, a novel which unpicks formal & social compositions, using the populated –...

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Briggs founded & co-runs the writing & publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. The Long Form follows This Little Art, a narrative essay on the practice of translation. In 2021, she won the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is the translator of 2 volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture & seminar notes @ the Collège de France...