The Longcut

by Emily Hall

The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn't know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she'll know it when she sees it.

Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a "completed" column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions--what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue--that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters.

An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Art, Novella, Novels, The United States Of America

144 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Longcut should tick all my boxes: an innovative work by a new author and released by a small publisher, the Dalkey Archive Press. As a bonus, it’s about art and contemplates the nature of art and the role of the artist. Despite all this, it just didn’t work for me. The prose, although distinct, felt grating to my ear. It’s a relatively short work but it was a struggle to finish. Still, I would recommend this to anyone interested in any aspect of it. Some may like it better than I did.

[Elizabeth (Plant Based Bride) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book broke my brain 😂

Reading Vlog with full review: [https://youtu.be/z87Modokypw](https:/...

Written review to come!

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emily Hall’s debut novel was shortlisted for the 2020 Novel Prize, and it’s now one of the titles heading up the relaunch of Dalkey Archive Press. Hall’s fiction draws extensively on her art criticism background. Her short novel’s a somewhat opaque, exploration of the nature of art, art practice, and the artist in contemporary society. It centres on a woman caught up in a web of semi-philosophical dilemmas, ceaselessly playing out in her mind as she travels to meet a gallery owner, referred by a friend ‘the well-known artist.’ She appears in a state of near paralysis, thoughts mired in unanswerable questions separating her from the possibility of creating her own artwork. Her reflections combine to form something that reads like the antithesis of a traditional artist’s manifesto, focused instead on everything her art isn’t or can’t be, rather than what it is or might be.

Hall’s style’s deliberately distancing, there are echoes of analytical philosophy in the way her narrator’s thoughts are structured. They’re expressed in a series of elaborate, excessively formal sentences that now and then break down, allowing the real or spontaneous to emerge, sometimes in surprisingly humorous ways. The would-be artist’s indecision comes close to a form of anxiety of influence, as she reflects on aspects of art theory, the output of other artists, dead and alive, including those who form part of her own social circle. Hall’s narrator seems engaged in a process that’s part self-interrogation, part intellectual masturbation, as she tries to come up with a formula or method that encompasses the nature and purpose of the art object, and how the new might emerge. Here the narrator’s situation’s further complicated by her keen awareness of her precarious position and the restrictions imposed by life in a late capitalist society, where her choices are limited by her slender means including the space for living and working, and the ways in which her time’s organised. As a character she’s an interesting comment on the state of contemporary art and the current generation of art-school graduates - often exiting programmes where the concept or the persuasive articulation of the idea behind a work’s more crucial than the work itself. The Longcut’s an ambitious, linguistically complex piece, I’m not sure it’s entirely successful as a narrative, it could be a bit too dry and academic in places for my taste, but I found it intriguing enough to capture and hold my attention.

Thanks to Edelweiss Plus and publisher Dalkey Archive Press for an arc

Rating: 3/3.5

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Artist considers how to define her work.
“I was always asking myself what my work was….It being acceptable as it was for an artist in my time to make art from anything, with anything, about anything, the world constituting the art world in my time being undelimited in a liberating or terrifying manner, still I could not stop asking myself what my work was, even as I told myself I really should already know the answer.”

The Artist considers how time was allotted and categorized while at her paid work and while creating her art.
“Time was always a question, not only in the category time, allotment of in the life of the artist but also in the category time, understanding the passage of….I had found myself considering the depressing ways in which the tasks of my job, answering questions and moving items into the "completed" column, of moving items between categories, could be said to constitute a system for marking or patrolling time, a system possibly in aid of the category time, understanding the passage of, although in an entirely depressing manner.”

The Artist displays her work for a gallerist. The gallerist examining her work, describes the Artist’s approach and intentions easily and succinctly. The gallerist said “Your mathematics approach….Making sense of x…or solving for x, although slyly, sometimes pointing away from x altogether.”

The gallerist’s explanation of her work shocks the Artist.
“What was my mathematics approach, what had she meant by it….I did not care for it, could not however at that moment say why. If x was meaning…that any compelling art solved for x…to be blind to what my work was, even as it had been so obvious to the hoarse gallerist, a mathematics approach, an infinite arranging….x being solved causing the world to go flat. Even as I suspected…that it had long gone flat. The world had disappeared into the "completed" column, everything having been arranged to my satisfaction, the open questions having closed themselves or been closed.”

Once the Artist believed that her work could not be defined or categorized, but now she begins to doubt her role as an artist.
“Further I was forced to admit that her answer to the question of what my work was likely as not at least partly correct, that I merely arranged….I asked myself if I could still be said to be an artist of any kind….or was I a person with an office job looking at her life with a sort of slant….if I could identify the misstep I could go back and undo it, was there no way to undo the misstep, was there no way to portage myself back to not having heard her say it, it now being knowledge or self-knowledge….”

The Artist, believing that defining means constraining, choses ambiguity and abstraction instead.
“…to unfind the answer to the question of what my work was, to unaccept the fact of knowing the answer, to unknow, uncomplete, unaccept, unclose. I would unsolve for x, I would deny there was an x to be solved….I would make things difficult because difficult was how I made things. This line of thinking was inconvenient, exhilarating….however I thought I would be careful how I told it. What was important was to not find the right words.”

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourite things said about art, said in fact, I thought, by Jasper Johns, I thought as I walked, was that you take something and so something to it and then do something else.

Blurb by Mauro Javier Cardenas author of Aphasia:

If the narrator of this stellar debut novel read this blurb, she would probably categorise it as blurb, metacommentary in the form of. Or if I wrote 'The Loser by Thomas Bernhard but about art' she would probably categorise it as blurb, name dropping and/or influence of. Or if I wrote 'the most fun I've had reading a cognitive apparatus in action, novel in the form of,', she would probably categorize it as category, categorization of categorization of.

Emily Hall's novel The Longcut was shortlisted for the 2020 Novel Prize run by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo Publishing and New Directions which was won by Cold Enough for Snow, but was picked up by Dalkey Archive and published in 2022.

It's hard to improve on Mauro Javier Cardenas's blurb, but I would add that this is Thomas Bernhard filtered through Jen Craig (who also provides a blurb) but with the secret sauce being a strong dose of Simon Okotie's Absalon Trilogy (although the latter though not a conscious influence on the author), with Marguerite's meticulous and conscientious pursuance of any train of thought and love of categorisation.

Anyone who follows my reviews will know that I hold Thomas Bernhard as the most important and influential European author of the 2nd half of the 20th century so when I read this LA Times article I immediately sought out the books covered (Haber's I had already ordered):

Despite his “difficulty” in text and in life, we find ourselves in the summer of Bernhard.

Jordan Castro’s debut novel, “The Novelist,” published two weeks ago, not only mentions Bernhard on its jacket but also references one of his books in the text. Mark Haber’s second novel, “Saint Sebastian's Abyss,” out last month, is the closest to a straightforward homage. Emily Hall’s debut, “The Longcut,” also published in May, follows an artist who wonders “what my work was” on a meandering walk to visit a gallerist.

Each of the three books could be described as a Bernhardian rant, or in some cases a diatribe, centered on the creation and purpose of art. Marked by lengthy monologues, emphatic hatefulness and a disgust with modern life, they pay implicit tribute to a writer whose influence seems only to grow with the decades.

Hall, who also name checks Jen Craig's brilliant Panthers and the Museum of Fire, in the article, states that her novel was a reaction to what she saw as the constraints suggested by the MFA program she attended, and in an interview in Bomb Magazine comments

One day after weeks or years of having a lot of trouble writing, I was in a bookshop and I picked up Concrete (1982), by Thomas Bernhard, and I read the first few pages. Here was a narrator who repeated himself and contradicted himself constantly, often within a single sentence. The digression, the inconsistencies, the contradictions: they weren’t flaws, they weren’t errors—they were the writing. And it felt deeply true to me in a way that the realist fiction I was trying to write didn’t. It was no less of a fiction but it was more real. Bernhard showed me the way out. My debt to him is enormous.

So, a narrator can be unreliable and capable. The combination creates a truth that language is complex enough to assert.

(More from the author at the LA Review of Books)

The Longcut (so called because of the narrator's dislike of shortcuts) is narrated by an artist as she walks through a city (I think New York) towards a art gallery to present her work to the gallerist. But her walk is somewhat directionless, she is unsure of what her art even is, and both her thoughts, and recollection of past thoughts, and her walk loop around in spirals:

I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery. As an artist I knew I should know what my work was, I thought as I walked, still I did not know what my work was, could not stop asking myself what my work was, it being impossible to think about anything else. It being acceptable as it was for an artist in my time to make art from anything, with anything, about anything, the world constituting the art world in my time being undelimited in a liberating or terrifying manner, still I could not stop asking myself what my work was, even as I told myself I really should already know the answer. Still there was never any question of the question, it remained an open question, the question of what my work was, which is to say how would I know my work when my work presented itself to me.

Walking from street to street in the city to a gallery for a meeting with a gallery person—a gallerist, a word I could not or would not say—I continued asking myself what my work was, how I might discuss my work, whatever it was, at this meeting set up by my friend the well-known artist who set up situations. This meeting not being, as it was not, a situation that could be said to be part of my friend’s well-known artwork of setting up situations, even as he had in fact set it—the meeting—up, the meeting unrelated to his work being in fact a meeting related somehow, in some manner, to mine.

(from a longer extract at Socrates on the Beach)

Her walk itself makes a fascinating contrast with the narrator of Panthers and the Museum of Fire who describes her walk across Sydney in block by block detail, whereas the narrator here resorts to terms such as raise plow for a location where there is a sign to that effect due to a steam vent in the street.

Her thoughts about art include replaying scenes from her office job - her role she describes simply as moving items into the completed column - a job she does because of the needs of the category expenses, pressures of in the life of the artist but which eats in to another category time, allotment of in the life of the artist, so that she resorts to attempting to fit her art into her work time, including taking an egg to her desk to be able to photograph it in a different setting and at different times:

The egg was not a real egg but one made of granite or marble or something made to look it, heavy in the hand and given to me be an aunt now deceased, its color grayish blue with flecks of black and other blue as well as flecks of something that flickered and shone and changed color, making me feel numerous and various ways depending on the time of day or the amount of light in the room. It—the egg— was kept in a box at the foot of my bed with other objects and clipped-out articles that, like the egg, did not comply or complied poorly with known categories, a box usually piled over with books and with further clipped-out articles and papers belonging to known categories such as bills or medical advice, not yet taken but that I did not feel like filing or putting away for various reasons including laziness. The box of noncompliant things had an air of uneasiness or rather I was not easy with it, the air of uneasiness as I looked at and through it being mine, I had eventually understood, feeling as I did or seeming as I was permeable to the airs and feelings of others not limited to people but including objects, or else the objects being permeable to my airs, taking them, willingly or unwillingly, on. I was certainly prone to think a great deal at that time when considering my philosophical objects about whether things fit perfectly into known categories, categories that could be listed and pronounced and sequenced, or whether they flew or flitted between them depending on the time of day and the amount of light in the room. The egg being an uneasy object, a thing with weight and color, still what was it really. Was an egg not a real egg because it couldn’t be eaten. It belonged, I was often forced to admit, to some known categories, to the category gifts from relatives, deceased, but whether it belonged to the category objects, good to look at was unclear, being as it was that certainly sometimes I liked to look at the egg and sometimes I shoved it back into the box and re-piled the books and compliant papers on top, forcing myself then to think about anything else. It certainly did not belong to the category fire, things I would risk my life for in a, I would not have run back into a burning building to pop it in my pocket, certainly however, at the same time it did not belong to the category chuck, things I could easily, especially when the sunlight moved across the room in a certain way. Thus the condition of having no category or known sequence of categories kept me from chucking the articles and objects but it did not prevent me entering a zone of not understanding what I was looking at, further keeping me in the zone of thinking about zones, even as I had found myself in or remained in those zones for years or more.

The idea of pursuing the truth of the egg’s category and its relationship to other philosophical objects had led me to pop it—the egg—in my pocket and carry it to my job and put it on a ledge that happened to be attached to a wall near my desk unit, the egg thus being lit up in bright everyday light entering through windows that began by my feet at the floor. The desk unit was not in fact my regular desk unit, being as it was a temporary desk unit I had been moved to by my boss while some repair was being done on a vent over the location of my usual moving of items into the “completed” column. I’m sorry about this, he had said on the day he moved me, he had been really very sorry and indeed had looked a bit sorry, not knowing, as he had not, how long this situation or condition would go on. Thus was the new desk unit a spatiotemporal unknown, its zone of spatiotemporal unknowability being perhaps a factor in my idea of putting the egg on a ledge in order to observe it, an object from an uncategorized zone dwelling in a zone of spatiotemporal unknowability. I thought, that is to say, that I could find out if the zone of not understanding what I was looking at extended in some manner from the foot of my bed to my job, whether it could be said to be a zone of place or a zone of time or a zone of something belonging to the object, something about the truth of the object or its categories, a quality or set of qualities jolted into clarity by the instability of the spatiotemporal unknown. Thus it was impossible to avoid the zone of thinking about zones, the zone of my job thus possibly constituting, as it might, a zone linked to the zone of the foot of my bed by various zones of varying concrete condition. Thus the egg became a double agent crossing the borders of zones, working as it did against the foot of my bed while at my job or working against my job while at the foot of my bed.

This obsessive categorisation is at the heart of her mode of thinking and indeed when she finally meets the gallerist the latter comments on her 'mathematical' approach making sense of x, or solving for x, although slyly, sometimes pointing away from x altogether, which leads the narrator to have a breakthrough of sorts, that in fact she needs to do anything I could to unfind the answer to the question of what my work is

I suspect the book contained intended messages about artistic creation which passed me by (I'm much more mathematical - the very label that horrified our narrator), and this isn't up to the standards of Bernhard or Jen Craig (but then little is) but this was a fun and compelling read.

4 stars.

[Jay Sandover · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ran, I ran, running however I thought I would be careful how I told it, the story. What was important was to not find the right words.

The author of this short, brilliant book finds the right words. It is an exercise in how the perfect words and the right punctuation can push language to an obsessive clarity. This is one of the many things fiction can do: deliver the essence of another being's thinking. When done with such care, as Hall does with this book, the world never goes flat, and that is one of the narrator's concerns, "keeping the world from going flat." The narrator is an artist who is concerned about the question of her art, and this question is also about how to be in the world. If you like Thomas Bernhard (Correction, Concrete, The Loser) or David Markson (Wittgenstein's Mistress), two influences on this novel, you'll like this book.

[Lira · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me, as it did, a month to read this book. My reading of this novel, being as it was in the category books, that I fanatically love while also occupying the zone of books, that take a month to read produced in me a feeling, or one very like it, of a chimeric interpellation that couldn't help being, as it couldn't, wholly unprecedented in my life.

I often wonder how many problems are taxonomic in nature, and I've concluded that most of them are, and this book helps you *spin* into the fundamentally taxonomic nature of most problems. Which feels fascist. Which you'll get if you read the book.

I get annoyed when reviewers say things like, "This book is important." But...this book is important. The narrator of this novel personally understands Lila Cerullo's dissolving boundaries (without ever explicitly referring to Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend). The narrator of this novel personally understands the frenemity between understanding and non-understanding. The narrator of this novel shows her work.

God I'm apopletic I wasn't the one to write this. Emily Hall, who are you; how is it that you understand the unserious, serious, dicking around, attentive, ruminating entity that is me. This work is not, as it isn't, as it couldn't, but for its opposite being true, within the pale.

I am aflame with possibility, thank you thank you thank you thank you

[Melynda Nuss · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understand the mixed reviews. The narrative voice loops and swirls around obscure artistic questions as the narrator walks from her so-called studio (her apartment) to her job (moving items into the "completed" column), reflecting on rendez-vous with artist friends, with her clever and not unsympathetic boss, and with a hoarse-voiced gallerist who seems to understand the artist's work better than the artist does herself.

The voice can either be annoying or hilarious -- in fact, it's usually both. But I opted for hilarious most of the time, and by the end, I was laughing out loud. I was overjoyed that (spoiler alert) the artist finally figures out what she's doing with her work, even though I'm not 100% sure what she's figured out.

It can be a tough read -- don't be mislead by the book's short length! And it does involve some heavy artistic theory. But I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with Hall's serious and somewhat obsessive narrator. Just sample the first two pages to get a sense of the voice. If you can imagine spending 144 pages with this person, you'll probably love it. If you want to throw the book across the room you probably won't.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/kGbqnvBMq5o

[Critter · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Longcut is a difficult book to read. It is a dense read that is philosophical, dry, and very academic. This book is a novel focused entirely on trying to be deeply impactful and meaningful. It unfortunately doesn't draw a person in with the characters or story but is entirely focused on a philosophical discussion. While this can work for some readers, it does not work for me and felt very similar to assigned reading in high school that is focused on entirely on having students learn different elements of fiction.

I would like to thank Dalkey Archive Press for providing me with an ARC.

[Denver Public Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Emily Hall's day job is editing exhibition catalogues at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and readers will see that sense of art and the art world woven into The Longcut, her debut novel. Like a trimmed down 'Ulysses', this novel traces an unnamed narrator as she walks through the city to an appointment with a gallery owner. Her internal dialogue ponders her day job (moving items into a "comnpleted" column), her own art, and what it actually means to be an artist. It rambles and twists and jumps into different mind spaces, like a Miranda July novel, but ultimately keeps circling back to the question of 'What is art?'

[Roger · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF Sadly, I found this a nearly unreadable novel of claustrophobic pretension. I am drawn to the experimental and had hoped for wit and the profound. Sometimes experiments do not work, but we still need them. In this case, bringing an art crit consciousness to the novel turned out to be deadly, but I applaud Emily Hall for daring. I don’t applaud Dalkey Archive for selling me the book.

[Nestor · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF — had to give up 30 pages before the end. As an artist who also didn’t know what my work was for a while, this felt like an exhibition of unchecked neuroses rather than “comic ingenuity,” as the blurb said. Also, I don’t think the author knows what fascist ideology really is.

[Henry Knollenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I initially rated this 3 stars but then changed it to 4 because 3 didn’t look right for what I’m feeling. I’d say it’s a low 4 I suppose. I was interested all the way through and while I’m not certain I totally got it, i liked it enough to where it’s going in the possibly reread pile. It is hard to describe one’s - my - work; I very much relate. I also think categories are fascist in nature. I also sometimes throw myself into bed like an undergraduate. I also fear the world going flat.

[Daniel Choe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty great for anyone who has experienced creative paralysis. Bernhardian sure, Haberian sure, but more academic than either I think. It did make me want to get a tattoo of the words "raise plow" however. Can something academic make you want to get a tattoo of it? Well, I'm sure. People get tats for all sorts of reasons, including overanalytical ones.

One bad thing though is she talks about particle wave duality, which I hate seeing in fiction.

But that badness is undone by the centrality of a stone egg.

[Jody · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to lie, this book was a slog. It's 144 pages and took me a week to read. Especially at the beginning, and maybe a third of the way through, I struggled with parsing out the syntax to get at the meaning of Ms. Hall's sentences. (Now, I have a chronic illness that induces fatigue and brain fog, so that was part of it, but I'm pretty sure I would have struggled anyway.) It's a breathless (see page-long paragraphs and no breaks; chapter, line or otherwise) recounting of an artist, stuck in a meaningless, boring office job, trying to answer the question of what her work is.

I almost gave up several times, but I thought there had to be a pay-off. And there is.

If you've ever been an artist stuck in a day job, you will recognize a lot of the thoughts and ideas here. You may also be stunned by some of them, by how right they on the nose they are and how jealous you are you've never articulated them yourself. And if you don't consider yourself an artist, then this might be a window into the strange-seeming person in the next cubicle, who can't seem to make themselves fit into the corporate grid. In other words, stick with it. Keep reading. You may end up loving this narrator. And this book. I did.

[Daniel O. Oni · Rating 5 out of 5]

how to make art while keeping a job and the necessity of figuring out what the object of your artistic practice is.

"my job thus resembling one of those deadlocked puzzles, there not existing without the irritant the art. Which is to say, to make my job my patron."

[Jessica Ziegler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel seen

[LKay · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here I was, thinking this would be a short novel I could easily polish off but wow was I wrong.

The writing style of this book is extremely hard to parse - I found that if I read at my normal pace, I totally lost track of the long, meandering sentences and paragraphs. I had to speed read at a breathless pace in order to glean meaning from the words and to understand what was going on. This started giving me a headache and wasn’t an enjoyable reading experience at all. It may be a short novel, but I don’t have the will to keep going with it like this.

[Jill · Rating 1 out of 5]

A debut novel, trapped in artspeak that falls short of expectations.

[Peter Anthony Redstone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very stimulating and thought provoking book about the very nature of an artist's thinking about their work. Not surprisingly it is a mixture of chaos and order written in a beguiling intricate style. It deals with questions of 'what is my work' and even more relevantly in today's world, 'how to talk about my work'. This a challenging but very rewarding read!

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some passages from The Longcut:

*

“Letting meaning come up from materials was a way of avoiding limiting what you were—I was—seeing or making or already assigning meaning, letting meaning come up also being a way of letting things lead to other things, like the sculptor Engman inventing a new kind of golf club with his insight into shape and movement and form. The guiding or subduing or both leading to feelings of waking up and spiking out into time in the—my—most gratifying encounters with objects or art, on first and subsequent encounters, not therefore producing feelings of merely illustrating an idea, merely illustrating being a quick path to the work going flat. Moreover, I did not want to already know what my work meant, whatever my work was, I wanted to make it in order to find out what it meant, these two things being impossible to be simultaneously true no matter which path I took to try connecting them. This I felt to be deeply true, even as I knew that the opposite could be true, I had seen this to be true with artists who started with nothing more than an idea plus a typewriter and an action or two. Which is to say that I could not stop myself pursuing ideas and considering what their form should be, wanting as I did to see what they looked like.”

*

“Feeling then at that time in the past or recent past that art should point the way to a better world, whatever the work doing it turned out to be, I felt that everyone should be making work about utopia or talking about their work in terms of utopia or its relationship to utopia, my feeling that this was the only possible subject and that the artists ignoring it were wasting everyone’s time being not however the only fascist aspect. Utopias themselves carried the possibility of a fascist ideology, there being the necessity of rules for achieving the kind of harmony that any utopia promised, there had to be rules for harmony that must inevitably however run counter to someone’s deepest feelings, causing someone to doubt or feel different about it—the rules, the utopia— the rules thus reinforcing the feeling of fascist ideology for that person feeling contra, as that person’s harmonic feelings turned contra. So while utopia seemed to point to the best and rightest alternative to the way categories in life in our later-capitalistic society were entrenching, sometimes terrifyingly so, they also pointed in the other direction, to idealistic systems that couldn’t stop themselves entrenching and oppressing once anyone began feeling contra, the possibility or danger of fascist ideology thus creeping in. Having stalled or given up the project of staging and photographing an invented utopian community, paralyzed instead of charged by the ways in which it was pointing in both directions, still I could not stop myself continuing admiring utopian communities in the same way I admired the noncompliant objects and papers in the box near my bed, refusing as they did to submit or conform to any known or dominant system, whatever it was…”

*

“Should you do what is natural to you or what is entirely difficult. Should your work be that on which you alight logically and easily, or should you fight your way toward it. Should you—I—corral or discipline your disorderly cognitive apparatus or allow and even encourage its relentless maneuverings. Should you—I—bolt from my natural tendencies or run toward them.”

*

“Surely I knew that already, I said. Surely you did, she said.

So in fact I’ve learned nothing, I said. Maybe not, she said, but you’ve learned it thoroughly.”

*

“I ran, I ran, running however I thought I would be careful how I told it, the story. What was important was to not find the right words.”

*

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing that strikes you about this book is its style. It's a long internal monologue. The narrator has some limited interactions with other people, but there is no dialog. The personal interactions all play out inside the narrator's head. And what a strange head it is! If this is stream of consciousness, I thank God that it isn't anything like my consciousness. It's a rapid fire rush. There are staccato bursts bridged by flowing near nonsense, and repetition is used not so much for emphasis or poetic effect as to give us a funhouse mirror view into the narrator's warped mind.

She's an artist in search of her art. Or at least that's what she repeatedly tells us. She wants to know what her work is. She makes tentative forays through photography and video, taking pictures of the polished marble egg depicted on the cover and on the crane outside of her office window. She worries that what she is doing is trivial or that she is missing the point. So did I. Her pictures didn't seem like much as art, though toward the end I developed some appreciation of the artistic thought behind the videos of the crane. I guess the marble egg was a birth symbol or a sterile birth symbol, but I think that part didn't really matter. Is she an artist or a nut? Of course she is both.

It became apparent to me by about page 20 that the narrator's art was her search for her art. I wanted to scream at her that her goal was right in front of her. She just needed to reach out and touch it. She was like Dorothy Gale who could have gone home to Kansas any time, just by clicking her heels together. The dramatic tension came from watching the narrator stumble around her goal without seeing what was before her eyes. But in this story, reaching the goal had a built-in contradiction that was not a problem for Dorothy - our narrator couldn't ever find her art because by definition that would be the end of her art. Having had this realization, I read on with horrid fascination worrying about how Ms. Hall was going to be able to give the search some momentum, some forward motion to keep it interesting, when success would necessarily mean failure. The final resolution of this problem at the end was imperfect, but it was pretty good - better than I expected after I sensed that Ms. Hall had painted herself into a corner.

The internal monologue often felt like a mild rant, a kinder version of a Thomas Bernhard novel or Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. Our narrator doesn't have the masculine power mad narcissism in those other books, but she definitely has a pretty high opinion of herself and though she has a few doubts about whether she is really an artist, they are fleeting. Her self-confidence gives us confidence that she may really be who she thinks she is, but it also makes us doubt her sanity.

And then there is her job. She works at a computer age clerical job that is a sort of modern-day version of the pathetic clerk job inhabited by Akaky Akakievich, Barltleby the Scrivner and Bob Cratchit. Her boss seems to be a decent person, and she tries to deliver as an employee. She tries to think of her job as her patron, the enabler of her art. But it's all a big fail. It's amazing that she isn't fired. There's a deep seated contradiction between her art and her job. It reminded me of Thomas Mann's commentary of the life of the artist in Tonio Kroeger.

[Zovi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I almost didn't want to finish this, but I am glad I did. It is not that it sheds its circling, repetitive, spiraling, idiosyncratic style at any point, as it does not, but it does gain a direction, a forward slant, if you will. And it is cathartic to see a story about someone who doesn't have her mental landscape sorted out, and who is nearly defined by that, because I feel similarly, though in different quasi-structures than the narrator here. And I really appreciate the ending, so much. I am not sure if others will, but I did. I think I was afraid to finish the book, actually, because I was worried there would not be an escape from the spiraling, and the spiraling would just make me sad. But instead, the spiraling made me hopeful, in a way that would only make sense if you read the whole thing.

Also, I finished this book by reading the last 80 or so pages (out of 144) in one sitting. I believe, if possible, reading the entire thing in one sitting might make it even better, or more correct, even, if you can.

[Annabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

really a trip. kind of reminded me of how should a person be but funnier and somehow more absurd. I feel like this book veered so close to something that I would ordinarily find obnoxious and self-indulgent but instead here I feel like it works. really crazy and inventive use of language and repetition (the satchel pages, klaxon, sluice, raise plow, and so on…) and just a fun (if also very hard…) read. maybe most accurate depiction I’ve ever read of what it feels like to be in a thought spiral. feel like I will want to return to this!

The loop slyly pretending to be unfree but in fact being free, a spiral, an endless getting back. There were harmonics but not harmony, I now understood, having mistaken as I had the one for the other. The sly mutual cooperation of order and chaos was not the same each time, ongoingly ongoingly it was a negotiation, not with balance and moderation but with revelation and scorching earth, not with singing but with forcing, cheating, thwarting, keeping the world from going flat.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A singular and challenging book, but one where I enjoyed every part of the necessarily slow and brutal process of reading. Except the parts I hated, though there weren’t many of those. Dense and nearly devoid of paragraphs of dialogue, circular and almost incantatory in its prose, this book was a challenge for me to read, but the quality of its writing was never in question—just its density. (Reminded me of advice I received decades ago to read Gravity’s Rainbow as a long poem rather than a novel: that approach worked well here.) Whenever I was able to muster the concentration necessary to return to and engage with The Long Cut, I inevitably found myself smiling. It’s incessant, claustrophobically interior in its focus, and neurotic, but impishly so, a loving and loyal satire of overthinking art. Imagine Michelle Tea were Samuel Beckett? Took me ages to finish this slim volume, but I never regretted when I reading it, even if I wasn’t always smart enough to read it for long.

[Suzett · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an artist, I was very keen to read this book. However, it was extremely dense and difficult to read due to the long, circuitous sentences and the dry, impersonal story-telling style. I wanted to like it, but my mind would wander on every sentence. I considered DNF'ng this book several times, but I wanted to challenge myself and try to get the lesson out of it since I had already invested so much time. To keep my mind from wandering, I ultimately decided to read the last 50 pages out loud. This strategy worked and helped me wrap it up in two sittings.

Ultimately, I did get something out of it - the same subconscious question I have also had about the evolution of an art practice and what keeps it going long term. So, for this reason, I bumped my rating up to a 3. I believe it could have been written in a more effective and engaging manner. I am glad to see the back of this book and get on to something easier on the eyes.

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is ecstatic art! This is, literally, what it is all about. “Good, said the spiral, there you are again.” Relearning and learning and unlearning and looping through routine and chaos to discover, over and over again, the newness of things, the immutability of things, the fact that the minute you decide one thing or person is one thing or another you and everything else in the world dies. But the spiral brings you back, each time a little different, in a different light that yawns across the room.

[Mauro · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the narrator of this stellar debut novel read this blurb, she would probably categorise it as blurb, metacommentary in the form of. Or if I wrote 'The Loser by Thomas Bernhard but about art' she would probably categorise it as blurb, name dropping and/or influence of. Or if I wrote 'the most fun I've had reading a cognitive apparatus in action, novel in the form of,', she would probably categorize it as category, categorization of categorization of.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book came highly recommended, so I suspect my inability to fully engage with it says more about me and my tastes than the merit of the book. I give the author credit for leaning into her distinctive style, but it simply didn’t resonate with me. Although I enjoyed the themes and some of insights in this short novel, by about halfway through I began to find it incredibly monotonous and found it a struggle to finish.