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| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION GODDARD | 31330009305842 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/GODDARD | 31480011637557 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC GODDARD | 30470002074960 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | FIC GOD | 32124002118404 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC GODDARD K | 32128004149440 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A FEBRUARY 2023 INDIE NEXT PICK
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE
A short, lyrical debut novel about love, loss, work, time, and the unquenchable desire for connection with others--for fans of Jenny Offill, Mieko Kawakami, David Szalay and Sheila Heti
The second time you came, we went from bar to bar to bar. It made the city feel smaller. Like a map we were folding to the size of a stamp. We were good at that. We could have fit an entire universe inside a matchbox.
Exquisitely crafted, richly imagined, and as funny as it is moving, Hourglass is an unusual and uniquely told love story. Turning time upside down, it combs the wreckage of personal heartbreak for something universal and asks what it means to lose what you love.
"This book is such a sneaky head f*ck--an epic poem in an ancient style about the brutalities of modern love, a masculine interrogation of feminine heartbreak, a really beautiful way to spend an evening"--Lena Dunham
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Goddard's bracing and intimate debut novel (after the poetry collection Votive) charts a passionate love affair as well as its breakup and the painful aftermath. On one level, it reads like a letter: "You've been gone for five years and I do not know where you are," writes the unnamed narrator to his lover. The brief chapters, comprising short single-sentence paragraphs, could also be taken for diary entries, jottings that carom from flash floods of emotion ("You picked up your sunglasses and I was in pieces") to lyrical observations ("The sky looked like the inside of a cheap tent"). The format not only hints at the unnamed narrator's loneliness and sense of isolation but it also adds resonance. Ordinary sentences like "I know that you are right about that" gain an extra charge of significance by virtue of their isolation on the page. Elsewhere, imagery alludes to broader memories: "The large brown chair is the nest that you have chosen." At times, the weight given to small details blunts the overall impact, but their precision mostly makes up for it. In addition to poetry, Goddard's project brings to mind the atomized tweet-inspired novels of writers like Patricia Lockwood. Like a distinctly revealing internet thread, this will capture readers' attention. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
If it's true that in order to create something universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific, then with his fiction debut poet Keiran Goddard has written something like the universal love story. Written entirely in a kind of verse - by which I mean, a line break between almost every sentence - the three-part narrative goes like this: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets over it. Sort of. Both characters are unnamed. The narrator, a sometime essayist working a series of dead-end jobs, meets an editor. She has written four slim publications about Restoration drama ("smart people call short books slim books"). They fall in love; and she, at least, falls out of it. The plot is everyone's plot, at some time or another - and that in itself is the heartbreaking thing about heartbreak. No pain is unique, and all pain is unique. This is the paradox that powers Hourglass. I have rarely read a book that captures so succinctly the way that all lovers must (at least a little bit) believe they are the only people to ever feel this feeling, and the way that that is (at least a little bit) true. Goddard's narrator sees the world with the accuracy of a poet and the paranoid imagination of the socially inept: he speaks with a laser-cut and very funny precision that belies the way one imagines the world must see him. Whether he's cutting armpit holes out of his T-shirt to attend a funeral, showing a child at the swimming pool a picture of guillotines, or being frogmarched out of a party by his furious girlfriend for crimes he's not completely sure he understands, our narrator makes perfect sense to himself. And, occasionally, to her. It's the fact of his making sense to her that makes her love him: nobody else around him can see what he wants, and why he does the things he does. The world of Goddard's novel exists vividly on the page and yet to the narrator he is the only real person in it. Even the (ex-)girlfriend orbits him, in his telling, like a satellite moon. Which is, of course, the narcissism of the heartbroken. It is how it feels to be grieving; and this novel handles grief deftly and strangely. The city is "filled with wet cardboard"; he bins "whatever is bothering [him]", such as wooden spoons and the toaster and the spice rack; he screams at a Boy Scout in the supermarket. He tears receipts into confetti at his mother's funeral and walks until his feet bleed and tries to run a marathon one drunken morning, wearing his jumper from the night before. Hourglass sits somewhere between prose and poetry; somewhere between millennial sensation Hera Lindsay Bird, say, and a Joycean stream-of-consciousness. Virginia Woolf called Ulysses the work of "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples", and there's something sticky and masculine and physical about Hourglass: all sweat, and spit, and skin growing over Biro lids lost to an itch under pungent plaster casts. It makes the book alive. It's disturbing, in the way that looking at the world - and at love - through someone else's eyes would be. There is often an artfulness to novels written in a capital-S Style: novels in verse, novels in aphorisms, novels (like this one) that are not prose, but not not prose. But the style here feels like work in the way that being a person is work; and specifically, perhaps, the way that the unnamed narrator finds being a person to be work. He tries - God, how he tries - to be human like everyone else. He wants to be ordinary, and fears he is not; he wants to be extraordinary and fears he is not. He is, of course, both. "Love is the constant worry that someone else is dead," the narrator tells us near the beginning, yet this is a book about someone learning to be alive; learning to love - if that's not too big a word - oneself, and through that, the world.
Kirkus Review
A story for fans of Jenny Offill and Marguerite Duras. The narrator of British poet Goddard's debut novel is a writer who falls in love with an editor who publishes one of his quirky essays. The book highlights the way they meet and marry, and the contours of their relationship, through fragmented narrative. It is a tantalizing concept decently executed. For every lovely flourish of language, there is an odd moment that goes on a beat too long, such as early in the courtship, when the protagonist asks his lover to "push a bit of chewed-up potato into [his] mouth as if [he] were a baby bird," and she does. To each their own when it comes to intimacy--and at the very least the vulnerability is admirable, as is the poetic gambit of the second person. Goddard's use of the "you" address as a device throughout the book, as if the narrator is writing an extended letter to his beloved, works until it doesn't. It makes sense to clarify the writer's thoughts and feelings in certain moments, to show him understanding parts of their love story anew in hindsight, but it wears thin when he narrates events for the sake of the reader that the beloved would have been aware of as a participant, as in that time at the cafe, that other time at the bar, at dinner, at the party, at the pub. It does, however, offer readers the immediacy of a voyeuristic gaze. As a result, the story moves swiftly and elliptically in and out of reverie. Eventually the narrator slips into a malaise that reads as both idiosyncratic and relatable and touches on everything from the nature of labor and class to the role of media in our lives to living in an aging body. A funny and smart, insightful and strange story about time, memory, and grief. This is a lyrical meditation on love as well as storytelling itself. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT This first work of fiction by poet Goddard (whose poetry collection For the Chorus was a William Blake Prize runner-up) reads as a purposefully poetic novel. The ongoing series of descriptive phrases paint the interior mental space of a narrator, seemingly male, who waxes poetic about his lover, seemingly female. Descriptions of various sex acts involving a candle inject an interestingly offbeat charge into the narrative. A slew of successive free-verse couplets describe a typical lovelorn obsession in a somewhat atypical way; the intense level of description and analysis devoted to domestic life creates a novel frisson. A little more than halfway through the exegesis, the hourglass turns, and the couple split up. There proceeds a much more satisfying anti-panegyric about the endurance of loss and suffering and various bizarre coping strategies. The description in this section is much more brutally honest, including a studied critique of wage slavery. The way the narrator engages with the breakup is both captivatingly described and depressingly authentic, creating a Bukowski-esque feeling of complete revelry in lonely desolation. VERDICT This interesting take on novel writing creates a world of studied introspection, mixed with social commentary, that will appeal to lovers of language and patient readers of incisive ennui; recommended for fans of the author and of all things literary.--Henry Bankhead