A novel that is mostly about the deskbound drama of study: The heart quickens, no? Not for all readers, I suppose. In search of larger stakes, novels of student life have generally scanted the slow labor of scholarship as such, or the reckless midnight dash to the term-paper deadline.
Instead, as in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” university may involve champagne, plovers’ eggs and the “low door in the wall” to gilded love and disappointment. Or more sober lessons about sex and capital — as in the novels of Sally Rooney. “We read in order to come to life,” says the narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Checkout 19.” It is hard to think, however, of a novel that describes as precisely as Rosalind Brown’s “Practice” does what happens when an ardent young person sits down to read and learn and write.
It is January 2009 and Annabel, an undergraduate at Oxford, is preparing to write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets that’s due tomorrow. “Essay” here means, Oxbridge-style, a short piece on a theme of the student’s choosing, to be presented at a weekly tutorial. Annabel wakes early on a Sunday in her dorm room; admires a pre-dawn darkness that seems to her “like the beginning, or maybe the end, of a novel”; huddles against the cold she hopes will keep her focused and addresses herself to what William Wordsworth called “the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.” (The phrase supplies Brown with an epigraph.)
Annabel’s intention is to become all heart and mind, but the irritant body insists on intervening. She drags herself to the bathroom, makes breakfast, frets about the effect of coffee on her metabolism, thinks about the older man she’s seeing and wonders whether to masturbate. All the while, the sonnets “gaze whitely back at her.”
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.
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