HOURGLASS

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.