To After That

by Renee Gladman

Poetry. Fiction. A true account of a fictional work. Renee Gladman is the author of four previous books, most recently NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM, prose installations published by Kelsey St. Press in 2007. Gladman is editor and publisher of Leon Works, an independent press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, and teaches fiction in the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University. She lives in Jamaica Plain.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Writing, Literary Fiction, LGBT

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

Reviews

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review could’ve ended up a lot crappier. Not that I’m making too many promises with this one, seeing as part of what I took away from this book is how much it resists my typical review formula, but I will say it’s probably better than what it could’ve been. See, I originally planned to toss together one of those reviews that reported on a book’s fundamental contradictions, explored the contradictions a little, and landed on “well what the hell do we know.” Those reviews often feel like they’re dancing around a point without knowing it, and frankly, I think that’s because the reviewers themselves don’t know they’re dancing around a bigger point. Well, I landed on a broader point about To After That. And yes, the point is “well what the hell do we know,” but that’s because one of this book’s broader points is “what the hell do we know.”

Let me elaborate, let me get into that contradiction I found. At first I was going to criticize this book for at once tantalizing and excluding me. See, it’s about a novella (a term I don’t like, but it’s Gladman’s term and it’s Gladman’s book, so I’ll use it) called After That, one that Gladman started but never managed to finish. The book the circumstances of its writing and a number of distractions that ultimately rendered it unfinished and unfinishable: the beginning and end of a romance, a few moves, the completion of her excellent and unclassifiable book Juice (which she describes as four novels compressed as much as possible), and the fundamental insecurities anyone who writes fiction faces when they encounter a piece of fiction they consider excellent. As a writer of fiction myself, I experience this last feeling all the fucking time and will sometimes set my own writing aside for days, weeks at a time in fear that I can never live up to all the great books I read, so yeah this last one resonated with me more than a little bit.

And yes, there was the thrill of identification, a dangerous thing to base your relationship on books with but an exciting possibility reading presents nonetheless. Why’s the identification model dangerous? In short, plenty of readers long to read that one book that says what we always wanted to say and centers on the protagonists we feel we are, but making that the number-one thing we look for cuts us off from a lot of great literature and sends us teetering toward that read “sympathy-with-the-characters-over-empathy-with-the-characters” model that we’re all better off avoiding. Yet identification was a big thing I enjoyed about this book at first; I, in short, got where Gladman was coming from, got why she had to leave After That unfinished. The complex relationship between an author’s life and an author’s work takes center stage in this book, which is awesome.

So the book invited me in many ways. It invited me to see from Gladman’s perspective and to see a little of myself in Gladman, and it also – here was the frustrating thing – awoke in me whole realms of curiosity about the unfinished novella. Hence me feeling excluded, hence me feeling like To After That was Gladman reporting on a party she didn’t invite me to. Since I could never read her novella, only her book about her novella, the precise significance of the novella remained unknown to me. So the significance of the book she wrote about the novella must’ve been doomed to the same fate, right? What good is it to know that she wants the book to be more Antonioni than Fellini, that its failed creation played a role in the completion of Juice, that she wrote the book with cinematic tricks in mind? The excerpted pages didn’t do much to clear up the issue for me; they only left me wishing she’d either finished that book or not published this one.

So I finished it and I set it aside and I felt the mix of satisfaction and dissatisfaction that typifies my three-star rating. Usually I give threes to books that have many working parts but don’t really pull it off as a whole, and it seemed for a while that To After That was bound to this fate. And I’m keeping that rating the same, more because I don’t know what the hell else to rate it than because I’m still vaguely dissatisfied with it, although I am a little dissatisfied. To tell the truth, I'm still getting to the point where I'm comfortable with the level of not-knowing, that Keatsian negative capability, that I think is required not to be frustrated with a book like To After That. Although I must at least be getting there because Gladman's all about negative capability and I am so into her books because of it. Yet this was a stretch for me.

It deserves another read, I guess you can say, because here’s what I’m thinking now: that Gladman herself didn’t know the full significance of either her novella or this book, that Gladman herself felt at sea while writing After That (the novella) and therefore had to abandon it. Which if anything presents the argument that literature and really all creative output is ultimately unknowable to us, that all we’re really offered are glimpses of what we as creative folks set out to do. This draws me back to the age-old dilemma of not knowing how to quite articulate our thoughts.

So let’s recap. Renee Gladman, a talented author by any reasonable metric, had a vision for a novella in her head that she couldn’t ultimately communicate, and so left us with a book about how difficult communicating her unfinished novella is, a book that doesn’t so much explain why the novella went unfinished (would that not detract from her point about how her own creation was, in this case, fundamentally unknown to her? How it took on a life of its own as soon as she started writing it and wandered off for reasons only it could know, if it was capable of knowledge, which it isn’t?) as transfer the experience of not knowing what you yourself are making to the reader, and I as a reader wasn’t entirely sure what I was reading, hence my own frustration, which I’d imagine is a reflection of Gladman’s frustration. And I wonder whether Gladman still felt that frustration after she finished writing this one, since it says on the back flap of my copy that she doesn't know how to classify this book. Or maybe that's just her comfort with negative capability, which all writers can learn from. Either way, this book made me feel a sense of loss, but I imagine it’s nothing compared to what Gladman felt when she realized After That wasn’t happening.

I’m never really done with Renee Gladman books.

[Morgan Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Renee Gladman is probably one of my favorite writers. She did something amazing in this book, exploring the complex layers of the process of writing. What does it mean to write something and then come back to it? How does time and how you've changed affect the narrative? She examines so many questions and sides of writing, it's hard to articulate the complex thoughts she's digging into. And that's just in regards to time.
A theme throughout all of her work is the nature of a city. She examines this again, exploring the way your environment (in this case a city) can affect your writing. How are place and story connected? How can a new place impact subsequent drafts? Gladman asks many questions and digs deep into the nature of writing. She comes back around to things she knows (and doesn't), as she tries to prode deeper and get answers. Nothing exists in a vacuum which is one of the reasons she is so interesting to explore.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A craft text on a ghost novel that explores what it means to continue a project, particularly one so profoundly rooted in a specific spatiotemporal location — and a specific writerself. Gladman reminds us that the “abandoned” book isn’t an abandoned, exactly. It’s also not necessarily finished. It sticks with us and peppers us with the questions that linger in the texts that rise to the surface.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book I want to be reading whenever I'm reading another book.

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a very odd way the most moving and emotionally resonant (for me) of Gladman's books. Considering that the central "character" of this one is a failed novel, a manuscript whose completion is deferred beyond the ending of the book, there's more here of human anguish, warmth, sex, and the rest of the package than in anything you're likely to find in the usual lists of literary fiction.

Gladman is simply inimitable, and woe to those who try!

[Roz Ito · Rating 5 out of 5]

I begin my response to Renee Gladman’s “To After That” with a memory: some years ago when I was a young college student living in San Francisco and taking writing workshops, I would follow my older, more experienced peers out to various public readings and literary events in the city. I had only a vague, preliminary understanding of experimental writing then, but the vast mystery of the prose I heard in those venues, combined with the serious, ambitious conversations that occurred at the bar afterwards as the sky deepened in color above us and the blurred outlines of buildings haunted the scene through smoked windows, never failed to overwhelm me with the tremendousness of the project of literature. One night my friends dragged me to a dimly lit bar, or perhaps it was a bookstore, or perhaps it was the living room of a tiny upstairs apartment (the exact place is not important), and there I listened to a relatively young local writer read an odd story about waffles and ringing cell phones and characters who disappeared and reappeared chaotically, as if driven by the force of some invisible narrative. Something about that story stayed with me, and came to me again when I cracked open “To After That” and began reading. I experienced an uncanny moment of deja vu, of recognition. I immediately went up on Google to do a little research and after following a few links I found my answer on the webpage of the Brown writing program: sure enough, the writer whom I had seen many years before in San Francisco was Renee Gladman, and the piece I’d heard her read was a chapter from “After That,” the “failed” book which occupies the center of “To After That.”

And so I feel implicated (twice!) as a reader of Gladman’s book. I feel as if I’ve been folded into her metanarrative as a member of her mute phantom audience floating through the barriers of time and fictional reality, like those camera ghosts who drift through walls in her imagined cinema of Carla and Aida. In many ways Gladman is a consummate writer’s writer, mulling over paradoxical problems of writing such as: how to surrender to a draft as opposed to finishing one, how to incorporate the events of one’s life into the event of the book, how to graft one’s future knowledge onto a writing project that belongs to the past, how to decide when a book is ready to be sent out into the world (published) and when it should be declared a failure (shelved). Through Gladman’s eloquent peregrinations around the problem of her failed text, we come to view the process of writing as an intricate record of the writer’s inner and outer life. As Gladman puts it:

“I had written nearly one hundred pages of a day in the life of four years in the living of me, if that is clear. And they were stalled, thus I was stalled.”

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I see the sentence as this thing you are moving through,” says Gladman. “You encounter words and punctuation the same way you would see a building or turn onto a street.” Gladman’s language is kinetic, moves with varying degrees of focus and discombobulation, mirrors the way we move through our lives & our days. She circles, trying to get inside or re-see what she is writing - again, a parallel to the way our neighborhoods & streets become unseeable to us in their familiarity. She also frequently asks, is this fiction?
I take this as an exploration of truth: since perception is all we know of our environments, little can be done (unless it is shockingly done) to dissuade us of what we believe is true about them. Writing, therefore, is a necessary fiction – there is no way to write one truth about something that is constantly evolving and changing and yet is only being seen and relayed through one set of eyes, through one keyboard and set of hands.

[Francesca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, intricate, muscular, profoundly intelligent & moving: especially for writers who know precisely the difficulties Gladman articulates here. She spins these near-impossibilities into a masterful meditation on the nature of language, relation & writing. It’s like a gorgeous little puzzle you could get lost in for hours, solve, forget the answer to & start all over again. Definitely my favourite of Gladman’s work I’ve read so far.

[Sarah Egan]

"It glows. I try to glow with it. This is not always possible."

How satisfying. And to make something out of failure!

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Not related to this writing but not unrelated either. I’m afraid to tell you where I am, what this place looks like. It does not follow the trajectory of the previous places I have lived. It is “easy” like the first one and “old” like the second, but it is up and away and cold and empty like nothing else I have endured. But beautiful, in that nothing has taken its light away. It does not fog; it does not suffocate. It glows. I try to glow with it. This is not always possible. But, you have to finish what you started, so you use your insomnia.”

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'As I wanted to get across in my novella, I lived in a city of rough surfaces that left patterns on you. Where they marked you depended on how closely you embraced them. Along the sides of my body (moving vertically) and on both sides of my hands (these moving every-which-way) were scratched permanently the lines to my story of that city. I think on my body the surface of every building is imprinted. And it is not just that I loved to touch concrete, I sought to sit on it as well. It was my custom to nest on cemented squares, in patches of sun, on the avenues of downtown. Well, now I remember that, at the very least, my book would be about concrete.' (11)

'I said I have always been a white-space writer. So far I have not suffered because of it. I am trying to convince my current publisher that novelists have long wrapped their prose with that dense emptiness [...] And it is not to fatten our books—though I certainly enjoy that consequence—that we surround our texts so liberally. But to communicate to the reader that something is missing, that the text before you is a partial, a shaving from some whole, somewhere else.' (19)

'The reading must have really struck me, because from it I culled these words: a text where the everyday means risking syntax. The person who wrote the first two drafts of the novella After That knew that there was something radical about walking down the street. She knew that the corners she turned, the people she came upon, the simplicity of their dialogue, had a tremendous impact on the flow of language [...] You risked the syntax when you wanted to make a place for the gaps.' (41)

'My challenge was to build, out of a series of empty spaces, a cohesive narrative long enough to be called a novella, but not so long nor so cohesive that it suffered from chronology, a thought that led me to this somewhat unfinished query: Does the unfolding of the narrator's world (i.e. her friends and history, her plans) produce the events? [...] Did I mean: can an event occur through the simple introduction of a name or relation, or must the event be planned outside the boundary of the text and then dropped in? A distinction I wonder at today. I mean, what does produce events in writing? It seems that the words of this language are greatly inclined to associate. They seek each other out; they make a group. This group seeks out the next group, soon they are a community, a city. You only need a word to write a novel. You only need half a word to write a novella. I had that half world; it was ong-. It did its part. Events were produced and strung along. There were 18,745 words, twenty-two events, twenty-one intervals, seven characters, five place names, a film, a fight, and an underground adventure. Had my half-word been lug- would things have configured differently?' (42)

[Featherbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published by the Dorothy Project in 2008, this unconventional work is a retracing of the author's journaling, reading, walking and thinking about a novel she was writing in March of 2000.

She is a poet who lives and walks through an unnamed town with her dog Eva and writes in cafes. She occasionally mentions her lover, Frog. She provides a scene or two from the subject novel or novella, After That.

"Inevitably, one kind of reading leads to another kind, and it was this moving from author to author that allowed me to cover ground as to the nature of my tone," she explains and mentions the "undefined flatness of Julio Cortázar's prose" and the simplistic character in The Gangsters by the late French writer Hervé Guibert who wrote To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life about having HIV. Other references:

Marguerite Duras's Two by Duras: The Slut of the Normandy Coast / The Atlantic Man

Peter Greenaway film The Falls
Anna Bailey's "obscure festival" film, Carla and Aïda, about two black lovers not unlike the author and her Frog, and the narrator explores that film in great detail. I could not find the film online.

Michelangelo Antonioni's film of Red Desert..

I enjoyed meandering along with this author, but many puzzles remain and I look forward to further exploration of her readings and other writing.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having published five of Renee Gladman’s slippery and strange experimental fictions, The Dorothy Project revives this 2008 account of her failed attempts to write After That, which would have been her first novel. Poet Paul Valery famously wrote “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” a point that Gladman bolsters as she circles and recircles her work’s uncertain course of creation, from the rapturous early throes of furious napkin jotting, through years of fresh drafts and abandonments culminating in “a flat, unalterable end.” Amidst a searching meta-narrative absorbed with linguistic and epistemological quandaries, Gladman provides just enough hints about the narrative of her “ghost book” to suggest it may have been a more inherently interesting failure than this “writing about the writing about the writing of that long ago book” proves to be. Which may or may not be the point of the whole exercise. “Confusion is a gift,” Gladman writes; it is also an acquired taste. Readers new to Gladman may better appreciate this elegy for her stillborn novel after first exploring her more conventionally unconventional fictions set in the surreal world of Ravicka, starting with Event Factory.

[Teena Chumber · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do not understand this book. May be it’s useful for writers? I was thinking she is writing about her previous work and analyzing it. But looks like there is no work, she is just making up stories. Reminds me of Radhika Apte saying BS in one of the serial. She was so serious about it, but it didn’t make any sense at all. May be I need to reread the book again..

in writers own words, this is how I feel:

“Did I exhaust myself thinking I was writing fiction when really I was just exhausting myself? Is the reader also exhausted, because how strange is it to read the final chapters of a book whose previous chapter remains (mostly) unknown to one?”

Exactly my thoughts..

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

For being such a short book (and Renee Gladman has plenty of great things to say about its shortness within TOAF) it does veer from being top-tier Gladman at the beginning (creating a recursive portrait of the creation of the work that is both this work and not this work) before getting a little stuck in a morass of its own making in the last twenty pages or so. Obviously not a huge mark against it, but in comparison to My Lesbian Novel, published alongside TOAF by Dorothy Project, and both concerning the most self-reflexive concerns of literary creation, I would recommend My Lesbian Novel first.

[Eliza · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked what Gladman is doing here, rehashing the iterative and fluid process and the lines between where writing ends and writing begins and reality begins and reality ends. Even in my library we had confusing time categorizing it as fiction or nonfiction, which speaks for its genre defiance.

But at times it went over my head for sure. Definitely a book I’d recommend to cerebral writers who have given up on a project, but maybe not everyone.

[David Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an eye opener. To think there can be so much said, and said well, about a broken work. She talks about a novella she never felt she got and that is this book. How was the novella written, where was it done (which city that she lived in) and why she never moved forward with it. I was very inspired by it.

[Cassie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 For another author I might have rounded this up to a 5, but as someone who's read more of Gladman's works, a lot of these musing seem like the beginning of some of the philosophies that she goes deeper in on as part of her later works.

[Arista · Rating 2 out of 5]

Word for word lovely, but I wanted to see how a she metabolizes failure into form. I found myself frustrated that she was aestheticizing the blockage. My impulse as a read is: “Either transform it into something or move on.” So that’s more about me than the book.

[Elle Zambarano · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5… very interesting thoughts on mourning the lost of a “failed” piece of art buttt a bit too meta for my taste

[Ocean Chamberlain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Renee Gladman is one of the genuises of our time.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know what? Hats off to Gladman for writing an entire novella about the novella she wasn't able to write. That's a swing for the fences.

[federico garcía LOCA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read twice, each time a single sitting, which is a habit I’ve enjoyed cultivating with Gladman’s works. This book project a clarity that I hope, one day, I might even achieve a half of.

[Courtney Sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A postmodern masterpiece

[michal k-c · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointed by this — solipsistic in its perspective and not exactly novel in its execution / concept. Metafiction and circuitous construction wasn’t exactly a new idea in the early 2000s

[Michelle (shareorshelve) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The unfurling of the book” and also a cure for a month-long reading slump. Renee never fails. Another share.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! What an honor to get to read this!

I loved everything about this book. The way the Gladman writes about space / moving through space (walking) in relation to writing fiction is so beautiful. Moving through time and space is so integral to the book and clearly is integral to Gladman's writing process as well. The main character of TOAF is an unfinished manuscript that is picked up several times by Gladman, and through that TOAF becomes incredibly self referential. What a delight! I cannot wait until this rerelease is published 9/17/2024.

" That joy lasts as long as your walk through the city, and dissolves when you return home to your work..."

"Confusion is a gift, I have always thought" (!!!!) Incredible

[Chrysanthe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Heartfelt yet analytical. Meandering yet precise. Not a word too much or too little. Humorous. Sufficiently exploratory yet grounded at the same time. You follow her every step of the way, and if you're like me, sometimes feel her invading your brainspace. Perfect length - 72 pages, I believe - so you can take it at a relaxed pace and still come out on the other side in a short period of time. If you've ever created a piece of art or writing, particularly if you have ever left a work unfinished, you will relate to this (and, y'know, feel some stuff).

[Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Renee Gladman’s narrative about the difficulties of writing, language and particularly, the dilemma of a poet in love with the uses of white space in prose, is a genuine metafictive non-fiction, a pastiche of the debatably existant novella, "After That." "To After That (Toaf)" evokes the Black Book of Doris Lessing’s "The Golden Notebook" and the reframing, collapse and reitieration of experience of Samuel Beckett’s "Molloy."

[J.I. · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book about a failed book. I read this as largely nonfiction, but perhaps it is more interesting as pure fiction. All this being said, while there are some interesting lyrical moves in the writing, the whole was very lacking. There isn't much there there, only thoughts scattered around the process of writing that feel neither new nor striking.