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.

Cassandra Campbell's performance possesses a mix of humor, ennui, and hope--which is to say she has the perfect voice for an audiobook about the inner world of a novelist. Zambreno's title refers to the nature of the writing process as the writer works on a novel called DRIFTS. Listeners may hear Zambreno's opening passages as meandering and unfocused. Yet the audiobook builds power with time as the protagonist observes the daily abstractions of her life. On a given day, she considers the works of literary exemplars; other days she finds meaning in watching the opening credits of the TV show "Taxi." The existential weight of the world bears down on her as she navigates her world in isolation. Campbell captures all these complexities, conveying deep truths about the artistic process. S.P.C. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine