Shortcuts

As if on cue: a novel whose unnamed protagonist perseverates on her own artistic freedom. The narrator of Emily Hall’s The Longcut begins as she means to go on:

I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery. … It being acceptable as it was for an artist in my time to make art from anything, with anything, about anything, the world constituting the art world in my time being undelimited in a liberating or terrifying manner, still I could not stop asking myself what my work was, even as I told myself I really should already know the answer.

Examples of her “work” include: photographs of an egg-shaped stone taken, or contemplated, at various locations in the office of her day job; footage of a crane through a window from a temporary desk dubbed “the spatiotemporal unknown”; and a hacked-up eraser compared, half-heartedly, to Descartes’ melted wax in the Meditations. The aim is to produce “philosophical objects”; failure is “merely philosophy.”

The novel h…