How to capture that? The problem with dailiness—how to write the day when it escapes us. It was the problem at the center of the work I was trying to write, although I was unsure whether I was really trying to write it. Never have I felt more emptied of the possibility of writing but more full of it at the same time. When did I realize I was suffering not from writer’s block but from refusal?

Drifts shows its “refusal” from beginning to end: it is the record and the result of Kate Zambreno refusing the subtitle of the book, which is a novel. “Is it a novel, though?” I kept asking myself, as I read. I get it, that’s the point: Drifts asks (Zambreno asks) us to ask, what is a novel, anyway? what does it look like to refuse the artifice of form (and narration and coherence and plot and all the other usual constituent elements of fiction)? what if instead of seeking unity you settled for fragments, what if instead of momentum you embraced meandering, what if you turned always inward, never outward? For people who like this kind of book, Drifts is definitely the kind of book they will like. I didn’t much like it, which won’t surprise anyone who has followed this blog for long. Novels in fragments usually strike me as cop-outs. Yes, it’s hard to finish the thing: to complete the thoughts, find the form, shape the narrative, make something solid out of fleeting impressions, make art out of experience, rather than recreate it. That’s the novelist’s job! So do your job: don’t put the unfinished pieces out into the world and excuse them on the grounds that experience, too, is fragmented and incoherent and random. I live that way: must I read that way too? Other readers love such fictions, though, including many readers whose insights I value highly. That’s what keeps things interesting!

There were definitely things about Drifts I did like. I liked learning about Rilke (I would have liked, better, a unified essay about Rilke); I enjoyed May Sarton’s scattered presence (I would have liked, better, an essay focused on Zambreno’s interest in Sarton). I liked the sense of what it might be like to be in Zambreno’s head—until I got tired of it, since it’s not a particularly restful or happy or illuminating place and being in my own head is hard enough these days, thank you very much. I got tired of the insistence on how hard it is to write, to be a writer, to write a novel. It started to seem unbearably self-absorbed, self-indulgent, solipsistic, all this moping around and lamenting and oversharing. “Think of Trollope!” I wanted to say. “Get out of your head and just tell us a story!” But of course that is not the kind of novel Zambreno is interested in.

I’m sounding more negative than I felt about the book as I read it. There were many moments in Drifts that interested me and others that moved me and others that upset me (I wasn’t prepared for the discussion of and image from Sarah Charlesworth’s series Stills). I found myself wondering why Zambreno didn’t just write it Drifts as memoir, rather than autofiction. I find it distracting reading works that refuse (that word again) to decide or clarify what they are, and perhaps my expectations would have been different if the pitch itself had been different. Still, the title gave fair warning, even if, arguably, the subtitle misled. I’m glad I finally gave Zambreno a try: now I know that she’s not for me. I’m not absolutely refusing to read anything more by her, but unless her other books are of a wholly different sort, I’ll let them drift away.