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Wrinkles in Time,
single work
essay
'I don’t want to start with Larkin because Josephine Rowe’s debut novel, “A Loving, Faithful Animal,” makes an ocean from his aphorism. Even if Larkin’s declaration remains stubbornly true — that old, known poem of how our mum and dad mess us up — Rowe’s book, a slim beauty, does so much to complicate this idea, in such a small space, that I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art. Imagine Rowe taking a page of blank paper — call it linear time — and crumpling the page into a ball. Nineteen-sixty-seven is flush against 1990. This crumpling, collapsing of Chronos is what it means to have a memory that’s associative and wild, or a family that might be equally uncontrollable.' (Introduction)