Drifts

Starred review from February 17, 2020
Zambreno’s immersive, exciting experiment in autofiction (after Book of Mutter) features a writer setting out to write a book called Drifts. The narrator, beholden to a contract, describes herself “filled with an incandescence toward the possibility of a book.” She meditates on the life of Rilke, reads Wittgenstein, and, in photo-studded accounts of walks around New York, patterns her work after those of Robert Walser and W.G. Sebald. But mostly, the narrator describes her time spent not writing: she cares for her dog, Genet; makes notes while on walks; emails her friends; and procrastinates by surfing the internet. Thus, Zambreno offers an enticing chronicle of how a book might actually be written—dramatizing how a writer’s work affects her life, and vice versa—filled with small moments of magic (“Today, after writing about my lost raccoon cat, I spy her”). After the narrator discovers she is pregnant, she turns toward developing a portrait of a writer contending with her own body. Zambreno succeeds at capturing her narrator’s experience of time and the unavoidable transformations it brings. The result is a captivating deconstruction of the writer’s process that will reward readers in search for meaning.

March 15, 2020
A free-spirited, essayistic novel exploring the complex links among art, parenthood, and making a living. If this foray into autofiction by Zambreno (Screen Tests, 2019, etc.) initially feels aimless, that's by design. Trying to make ends meet as a writer and teacher in New York, the unnamed narrator is struggling to complete a book tentatively titled Drifts. Her goal is to tell a story that's intimate yet free of story arcs and the baggage of character: It is "my fantasy of a memoir about nothing." So the forward movement in the early going has less to do with plot than its "series of moods or textures," the steady accrual of quotidian events: reading about artists and poets (Rilke and D�rer are particular favorites); arguing with her husband about moving; walking the dog; masturbating; binge-watching TV. Zambreno holds the reader thanks to the punchy, brief paragraphs and her quirky, gemlike sentences ("I began smoking again after we saw the stray kitten hit by one of the speeding cars on the corner"). The narrative gets a sense of order (or a different kind of disarray) once the narrator becomes pregnant; there's less of a feeling of "the vastness and ephemerality of the day," but Zambreno harbors no easy platitudes about how motherhood gives women a sense of purpose. (The section covering it is titled "Vertigo.") Rather, it applies a different kind of economic, emotional, and artistic pressure, prompting the narrator to think further about how her physical transformation impacts her senses of time and self. The charm of this novel is how it makes this deep uncertainty feel palpable and affecting; its fragmentary nature is a feature, not a bug. Adrift, the narrator engagingly tangles with everything from the Kardashians to Joseph Cornell for a sense of fellow-feeling. A lyrical, fragmentary, and heartfelt story about the beauty and difficulty of artistic isolation.

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May 1, 2020
The floundering writer who narrates this journal-like novel resembles a character in Zambreno's Screen Tests (2019), but readers become much more intimately involved with this chronicling of a year or so of metamorphoses. In summer 2015, the narrator is supposed to be writing a novel, Drifts, but she thinks it's more her fantasy of a memoir about nothing, a book about a feeling, her dog, her neighbors, stray cats, tree bark, her uncooperative body and quest for motherhood, and, as fall begins, her adjunct teaching. She reads about the lives of writers, especially Rainer Maria Rilke; writes incessantly in notebooks; and admits: I see literature everywhere, a vast referentiality. She takes photographs, shares emails with friends, endures depression, becomes entranced with D�rer's engravings, contrasts the struggles of women writers with those of men, and watches films repeatedly. How, she wonders, do others deal with the vastness and ephemerality of the day. Much transpires here, from the frightening to the ludicrous to the profound. Zambreno is perceptive, funny, and spellbinding as she reflects on and dramatizes the infinite complexities of womanhood and creativity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)