Hourglass

September 1, 2022

A writer stumbling from job to menial job meets an editor who has published four modest titles on Restoration drama, and they fall chaotically in love until it's all over; she loses interest. Her lover's pain may feel uniquely unbearable but is something most of us have known, and he recovers. From British poet Goddard, structuring his debut novel with verse-like line breaks; long-listed for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize.

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December 5, 2022
Goddard’s bracing and intimate debut novel (after the poetry collection Votive) charts a passionate love affair as well as its breakup and the painful aftermath. On one level, it reads like a letter: “You’ve been gone for five years and I do not know where you are,” writes the unnamed narrator to his lover. The brief chapters, comprising short single-sentence paragraphs, could also be taken for diary entries, jottings that carom from flash floods of emotion (“You picked up your sunglasses and I was in pieces”) to lyrical observations (“The sky looked like the inside of a cheap tent”). The format not only hints at the unnamed narrator’s loneliness and sense of isolation but it also adds resonance. Ordinary sentences like “I know that you are right about that” gain an extra charge of significance by virtue of their isolation on the page. Elsewhere, imagery alludes to broader memories: “The large brown chair is the nest that you have chosen.” At times, the weight given to small details blunts the overall impact, but their precision mostly makes up for it. In addition to poetry, Goddard’s project brings to mind the atomized tweet-inspired novels of writers like Patricia Lockwood. Like a distinctly revealing internet thread, this will capture readers’ attention.

January 15, 2023
A story for fans of Jenny Offill and Marguerite Duras. The narrator of British poet Goddard's debut novel is a writer who falls in love with an editor who publishes one of his quirky essays. The book highlights the way they meet and marry, and the contours of their relationship, through fragmented narrative. It is a tantalizing concept decently executed. For every lovely flourish of language, there is an odd moment that goes on a beat too long, such as early in the courtship, when the protagonist asks his lover to "push a bit of chewed-up potato into [his] mouth as if [he] were a baby bird," and she does. To each their own when it comes to intimacy--and at the very least the vulnerability is admirable, as is the poetic gambit of the second person. Goddard's use of the "you" address as a device throughout the book, as if the narrator is writing an extended letter to his beloved, works until it doesn't. It makes sense to clarify the writer's thoughts and feelings in certain moments, to show him understanding parts of their love story anew in hindsight, but it wears thin when he narrates events for the sake of the reader that the beloved would have been aware of as a participant, as in that time at the cafe, that other time at the bar, at dinner, at the party, at the pub. It does, however, offer readers the immediacy of a voyeuristic gaze. As a result, the story moves swiftly and elliptically in and out of reverie. Eventually the narrator slips into a malaise that reads as both idiosyncratic and relatable and touches on everything from the nature of labor and class to the role of media in our lives to living in an aging body. A funny and smart, insightful and strange story about time, memory, and grief. This is a lyrical meditation on love as well as storytelling itself.

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February 1, 2023

DEBUT This first work of fiction by poet Goddard (whose poetry collection For the Chorus was a William Blake Prize runner-up) reads as a purposefully poetic novel. The ongoing series of descriptive phrases paint the interior mental space of a narrator, seemingly male, who waxes poetic about his lover, seemingly female. Descriptions of various sex acts involving a candle inject an interestingly offbeat charge into the narrative. A slew of successive free-verse couplets describe a typical lovelorn obsession in a somewhat atypical way; the intense level of description and analysis devoted to domestic life creates a novel frisson. A little more than halfway through the exegesis, the hourglass turns, and the couple split up. There proceeds a much more satisfying anti-panegyric about the endurance of loss and suffering and various bizarre coping strategies. The description in this section is much more brutally honest, including a studied critique of wage slavery. The way the narrator engages with the breakup is both captivatingly described and depressingly authentic, creating a Bukowski-esque feeling of complete revelry in lonely desolation. VERDICT This interesting take on novel writing creates a world of studied introspection, mixed with social commentary, that will appeal to lovers of language and patient readers of incisive ennui; recommended for fans of the author and of all things literary.--Henry Bankhead

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.