August 14, 2023
Briggs’s charming yet formidable debut novel (after the story collection This Little Art) merges the chronicle of a young mother and her infant daughter with musings on the nature and possibilities of fiction. Over the course of a spring day, Helen, who lives in an apartment with her baby, Rose, works at taking care of Rose and understanding her new role as a mother. When Helen begins to read Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, her thinking turns to the elasticity of time, both in her own life and in the text. As Helen looks after Rose and herself, she considers writers and psychoanalysts including E.M. Forster and D.W. Winnicott (whose motherhood analysis leaves Helen questioning why “the mother she was supposed to have become” still hasn’t arrived) while reflecting, through a series of flashbacks, on her sustaining friendship with Rebba, her roommate prior to Rose’s birth, and her relationship with her grandmother. In a series of vignettes, interspersed with images referencing the shapes in Rose’s Bruno Munari–inspired mobile, 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.