Life intrudes on the life of a student struggling to write a paper

A day in the life of a young student who experiences her thoughts, fantasies, and wishes as she writes about — or tries to write about — Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Rosalind Brown’s Practice shows us just one day. Annabel, sitting in her small student room, attempts to write an essay about Shakespeare. She follows a meticulous, solitary routine but finds it repeatedly thrown off course as the day progresses: by family and friends who demand her attention and time, by thoughts of her much older boyfriend and his impending visit, by wild sexual fantasies and stories of her own invented characters — and by darker crises, obliquely glimpsed but capable of derailing Annabel’s carefully laid plans.

Rosalind Brown’s debut novel is getting some glowing and gushing pre-publication buzz, and I was lucky enough to receive a review copy from the publisher. As someone who has spent much of the past 20 years in and around academia, I was drawn to the premise: it sounded like a slightly different kind of campus novel. Brown is undoubtedly a gifted writer, but ultimately I think the premise was a little thin to maintain an entire novel.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, just so it’s clear: Brown is a very good writer, and there are plenty of excellent passages sprinkled throughout Practice — moments of wry humour, great observation and/or description. The characters who enter Annabel’s day are very well drawn, and one of them almost gave me whiplash, she was so like someone I know (in terms of cadence, style, etc. — it was uncanny).

As someone who has experienced a great many days at college, struggling to get to grips with an assignment, I found Brown’s protagonist’s experiences relatable and often amusing. The author does a very good job of writing the sense of frustration when a concept or direction feel aggravatingly just out of reach, constantly slipping out of your grasp. Or getting derailed, as the unrelated thoughts of a young mind bubble up and intrude — it can be so hard to focus on work, when you’re hungry, horny, and tired.

She is underwritten by this: this catacomb of her own bleak, confusing desires.

At the same time, the novel’s momentum dropped precipitously when I was about a third of the way in. It becomes clear why a single day in the life of a university English major is not a common/popular premise for a full-length novel. Similarly, if nothing really happens, the inner thoughts of a college student (brilliant or otherwise) aren’t as riveting as they might believe. (Perhaps this book is an attempt to illustrate the quiet narcissism of people in their early 20s.) The novel also features some modern literary fiction tropes: confusing affair with an older man? Check! Blunt and “shocking” language about body parts and sex? Check! It’s either a bit bland (affair); or it’s just not as affecting as it’s maybe supposed to be (use of the word “cunt”, for example).

In some ways, this novel is more an interesting writing exercise than it is an interesting novel. Brown does a very good job of making Annabel a somewhat engaging character, and if you’ve lived a day anything like the protagonist’s — whether at university, or remote working, or just struggling to focus on a deadline while the rest of your life intrudes — then you’ll likely find plenty of moments that you can related to and sympathize with. There are also a fair number of amusing and clever turns of phrase. It’s just, at the end of (Annabel’s) day, I didn’t feel especially satisfied by the read.

A cautious recommendation, then, if you’re looking a something short and tightly-focused in scale, if not particularly gripping in terms of plot. Despite this not really landing for me, I am nevertheless interested to read whatever Brown writes next.

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Rosalind Brown’s Practice is due to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in North America (June 25th) and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK (out now).

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads
Review copy received via NetGalley