Brown’s debut is exquisitely attuned to the thrill and boredom of academic reading: “The sonnets yawn and congeal, or rather she does. They are strenuous, they agonize.” Annabel has read some of the great interpreters of these poems — Helen Vendler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, William Empson — but today she is alone, annotating her printouts (2009, remember), ruminating about their moody, peremptory speaker and the love triangle he has sublimed into the timeless, indelible word.
She keeps getting distracted — she takes a walk in the morning mist, weaves an erotic fantasy about two imaginary men, the Scholar and the Seducer — but isn’t distraction the very nature of lyric poetry? The sonnet is a concentration of thought in action, but each of Shakespeare’s apt metaphoric turns is also a wild digression, an invitation to strangeness. Is love like a war? Or a trial? Or an experiment in optics? See Sonnet 46.
At its best, “Practice” conveys the hesitancy, extravagance and naiveté of a young mind discovering what writing can do. “One day perhaps she will be someone about whom people say, she’s read everything,” Annabel thinks. As the novel goes on, and Shakespeare recedes, it is possible to dislike Annabel. She is a deliberately limited character, still fondly referring to children’s books by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, even as she thrills to the novels of Virginia Woolf.
Limited, too, in her awareness of class hierarchy and her place within it — Annabel has her “room of one’s own” and someone to clean it, but not yet much perspective on this relationship. Most of all, she is limited by the shape of the novel she inhabits, which, like “Ulysses” and “Mrs. Dalloway,” takes place in the span of one day. But this is also Annabel’s great wager: If she uses this Sunday correctly, she may become a person capable of writing the novel we have just read.
PRACTICE | By Rosalind Brown | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 202 pp. | $26
