Poet and educator Lara Mimosa Montes plumbs the interstice between the real and the written in her debut fiction work, The Time of the Novel. The eleventh publication in Wendy’s Subway’s “Passage” series, this book would appeal to those interested in conceptual art, experimental writing, and cross-disciplinary works of art.

Similar in its approach to Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World and Katrina Palmer’s Reality Flickers, the central conceit of the novel is that the book itself is reimagined as an artifact of the story it contains. Where Siri Hustvedt and Katrina Palmer concern themselves with the artist’s archive and visual art, respectively, Mimosa Montes’s novel focuses on different modes of experience—the “Real” and the written, and whether the two modes converge, subsume, or deny each other.

The novel follows a woman going through a depressive episode who undertakes a part-literary, part-philosophical, part-psychological project to narrate her life into a work of art. She muses, “I held out some vague hope of meeting myself, believing that through the process, whoever I might become in writing might be more fully realized than whoever I was now” (10). The most obvious comparison in contemporary fiction is perhaps Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Where Moshfegh’s speaker yearns for an escape from her life, Lara Mimosa Montes’s seeks to experience life with complete awareness, like an omniscient narrator—both separate from and completely one with the present moment.

The Time of The Novel rehearses a question similar to W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of “ekphrastic fear” (from “Ekphrasis and the Other”) in which the reader of a text rejects the idea that one work of art could be truly present in another. In the same way, Mimosa Montes asks us to consider what would happen if the literary or written self could meet or take the place of the so-called Real self. Much of this work relies on the reader’s willingness to believe or imagine the book as the end product of the narrator’s literary and metaphysical undertaking in the story—they have the same title, after all. Despite its compactness, The Time of The Novel offers multiple avenues for inquiry into different modes of experience—mediated and unmediated, lived and literary—and does so conceptually as well as critically.

You can purchase The Time of the Novel from Wendy’s Subway.

Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.

Did you like what you read here? Please support our aim of providing diverse, independent, and in-depth coverage of arts, culture, and activism.