“ON YET ANOTHER HAND”

The Longcut by Emily Hall
Dalkey Archive Press, 2022

Emily Hall’s The Longcut takes place during an afternoon, evening and night in New York City, as the novel’s anonymous protagonist walks across town to keep an appointment with destiny, in the guise of a gallerist she hopes will represent her, then meanders the streets until she arrives at a former teacher’s house. Along the way, she endures the torment of “answering the question of what my work was” as an artist: she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be doing—only that, as she says, quoting Jasper Johns, “you take something and do something to it and then do something else.” Her squeamishness about commerce complicates her need for validation, while her day job enshrines the horrorshow of one possible future. Turmoil exacerbates the pressure of her drive to “decide any one thing, sifting and sorting from the stream of life, plucking one thing from the stream and then not regretting all the possible others.” The dilemma, what to do, and how to do it, confronts her relentlessly, in variations on a gamut of lines and phrases repeated over and over in an agony of self-consciousness, as she regards her predicament with an irony whose defensiveness leaves her exposed.

During their meeting, the gallerist sizes up the young artist’s work in terms that plunge her into dismay (“Making sense of x, she said, or solving for x, although slyly, sometimes pointing away from x altogether”), and later her old teacher reassures her (“you are in fact serious, or you wouldn’t be on my stoop in the middle of the night”). Finally, her discordant thoughts resolve in a passage that harmonizes them, and the effect is thrilling, in a bonkers sort of way:

Galloping and then running I saw that the way past death was to do anything I could to unfind the answer to the question of what my work was, to unaccept the fact of knowing the answer, to unknow, uncomplete, unaccept, unclose. I would unsolve for x, I would deny there was an x to be solved. I would arrange things to my dissatisfaction in all cases, every case would be the case, I would botch every transition, the hiccup, the glitch. I would plunge within limits and botch the limits, I would botch the pale, taunting and reneging on the pale and forcing things in and out of the network of things. I would misstep, I would loop and freely loop, I would make things difficult because difficult was how I made things.

The pleasure of The Longcut is like that of Beckett’s Watt or Stein’s The Making of Americans, whose scraps Hall has lifted from the junkheap and put to new ends.

If an author’s efforts in various forms illuminate each other, then Hall’s 2005-2015 Artforum coverage of New York City gallery exhibitions can be read as a record of the social and artistic contexts that underpin her depiction of a young artist in crisis in The Longcut. The novel, in turn, occupies the New York art world through the imagination, as the author takes possession of that remote territory, by erecting a fictional edifice upon her journalistic account of the shows that took place during the period when the novel is set. “The grid” of the text, as Hall writes of works by Alicia McCarthy, for example, “could also be a web, a trap, a barrier” with which the writer catches and confines her protagonist, who takes an “excursion among my tendencies in mental darkness” while daydreaming of “a map of digression.” And a line in her piece on Peter Dreher, “When we look at the glass, we look though it—or do we look at the surface of the canvas?” could be a question her fictional character poses, as a part of “this escalating origami of mindfucking myself to death.” In this way, Hall repeats her journalism in a finer tone, and creates a figure who doesn’t belong to the scene, but represents it.