A Horse at Night

August 8, 2022
Novelist Cain (Indelicacy) offers a rewarding collection of literary musings, combining personal reflections, criticism, and thoughts on the act of writing. Cain writes that “interiority is one of my favorite things to read in fiction—to abide in a narrator’s mind if that narrator, that mind, compels me—and when you read a diary you have that, ten fold.” Indeed, readers will enjoy abiding in Cain’s mind as she moves gracefully from topics as disparate as solitude (“it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone”), darkness (“maybe we get closer to something in the dark, or maybe it’s the opposite”), pets (“We are both neurotic,” she writes of her cat, Trout), and art (“How strange and sometimes demonic the faces of babies and children in early portrait paintings”). Books, films, and other artworks serve as signposts along the way—reflections on the work of Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, and Elena Ferrante appear frequently, plus she considers paintings by Paul Delvaux and Marie NDiaye. Readers will relish following Cain’s winding prose and carefully considered conclusions. Fans of her work—and of literary criticism more generally—won’t want to miss this. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

August 15, 2022
How one writer reads. Making her nonfiction debut, novelist Cain offers a spare, graceful meditation on her rich, idiosyncratic reading and her practice of writing. Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter, Adam Gopnik's Winter, and Annie Ernaux's The Possession are among dozens of works (a bibliography is appended) that have inspired Cain's thoughts about identity and authenticity, language and landscape, solitude and friendship--not least, the trust and vulnerability that complicate human-animal relationships, such as hers with her three cats. It was Marguerite Duras' The Ravishing of Lol Stein that inspired her to write fiction when she found herself unable to stop thinking about Duras' central character. Regarding her craft, "of all the forms language can take, the sentence is the one I'm most drawn to," she writes. "I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader's mind. I want to write what heightened experience feels like." Cain is excited by the idea that she might "haunt" her sentences so that "the reader might be taken over subtly." Her sensibilities, though, have changed as she has gotten older: "I have more fears than I had when I was younger; I am more rigid; and there has been a loss too of the freedom I once felt, when the world seemed entirely open, and utterly beautiful." How, she wonders, will these changes--and changes in the world, too, including climate change and the pandemic--affect the novel she is working on now? "I want to be able to write about loneliness, humiliation, and shame, things I never would have written about before, that would have embarrassed me," she notes. "For a long time I didn't want to write 'emotionally'...there has been something valuable for me in exploring the emotionless." Cain ties her development as a writer to her engagement in zazen meditation; in stillness, she was able to listen for her voice. An intimate recounting of a literary life.

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