Hourglass

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.)