"One solution for representing the internet-augmented discontinuity of contemporary life is the fragment novel. Seas of white space separate paragraphs, which together compose archipelago chapters; themes and subjects wash from one island to another; and voice is like climate, general across the complex. The fractured self, which is taken to be a microcosm of the fractured world, achieves coherence this way."
"A febrile, poetic autofiction about one woman's experience of COVID and its brain-breaking aftermath, the book self-consciously aspires to achieve a fresh form in order to depict a phenomenon overwhelming in its spatiotemporal scale. "A hyperobject, a Louis Wain cat, I said, when anyone asked what I was doing," she writes at the tail end of her book. "The challenge was to find a new style for a new materiality.""
The fragment-novel form arranges separated paragraphs into archipelago chapters, allowing themes, subjects, and a climate-like voice to unify a fractured self into coherence. That form, popular before the pandemic, can feel quaint after massive disruption and death. A prismatic, febrile second project largely abandons the fragment approach to depict a woman's COVID experience and subsequent brain-affecting aftermath, seeking a new style for an overwhelming spatiotemporal phenomenon. The portrayal is disorienting yet often beautiful and humorous, deploying whimsy over deep discomfort and terror. The work is uneven and sometimes drags, but its confusion mirrors recent derangement.
Read at Vulture
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