Helen and her young baby, Rose, are spending a regular morning together. They move, they rest, they communicate; Rose feeds. Thoughts and associations travel far beyond the remit of the front room in their rental flat, which they pace, and which, alive with them, continually becomes new: house plants shift, mountains of condensation form and then break down within the window panes, memories dance. Their delicate balance is interrupted by a delivery: the arrival of a novel, one of the oldest in the English-language: A History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. As the day progresses, Helen begins to read Tom Jones, a book which describes itself as inventing the novel for the first time, though many of its passages have the qualities of an essay, inviting a grappling with the novel form and its endless, constantly evolving modes. The Long Form is a radical reappraisal of our interdependence and connectedness, a novel which unpicks formal and social compositions, using the populated – peopled – form of the novel to meditate on very real social issues, from housing, to care-taking, to friendship – all highlighting our mutual responsibility in an increasingly atomised world. At once acrobatic and deeply attentive, The Long Form is a novel about creativity, about the ever-shifting positions we must take in love and care, and which uproots our understanding of social life, while providing a necessary critique and reformation of the novel form itself.
