Eliza Marley
Book Review
A review of Taylor Thornburg’s Agathe, 6:00pm to 7:27 (Lost Telegram Press). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
Read Taylor’s story “Come On, Come On, Come On” in Issue Three
A woman finds a letter her partner left her and in her immediate response, she sits and she thinks. What has happened? What will happen? These questions open a great chasm of causality that opens up the story’s world.
Agathe, 6:00 pm to 7:27 is the debut novel of author Taylor Thornburg. The novel follows Agathe as she reacts to shocking news. But is it so shocking? The story traces out her inquisitions to her absent partner, to herself, and to the paths they have crossed involving others and each other. The prose is densely packed with worlds spun outward, reconstituting memories and imagining futures. The compression of memory works as the engine of the novel, demonstrating the ways grief and introspection can dilate time. The impulse to recontextualize amidst a breakup or sieve through the happy moments searching for the nexus of what went wrong is carried out at the novel’s start. As Agathe’s memories progress, forwards and backwards, they spiral into different territory. The investigatory gaze of Agathe is a live wire. Her life, her desires, visions of who she thought she would be, her family and people she’d encountered all get swept up into her meditations.
Inclusion and exclusion through periphery attachments are seen across Agathe’s social infrastructures. Her own retelling positions her as someone inside academia but never fully accepted. The catalyst of Agathe’s exile, her removal from these spaces as a version of past failure, careens against the abrupt ending of her present relationship. The ways she’s been rejected, or her perceived rejections, and failures build themselves back up like a single tidal wave. The events shape together like destiny.
Agathe produces a close encounter with raw grief. The emotional charge of Agathe’s thinking takes the reader back in time through snippets of life before her relationship, their early days, and their final days through an associative drive. The memories are not memorialized, instead they are lived through and reconfigured, even editorialized. She is a character in her own life with a distance crafted by the perspective of her presentness along with the folding of time into something jumping and antagonistic. Scenes linger where the wounds are still fresh and issues go unresolved. Agathe recounts more losses than wins and casts herself as someone who a lot of the time finds herself hiding away or being cast aside.
Thornburg does an excellent job of playing in the memory space. As Agathe is stitching across gaps she narrativizes herself. Figures evoked – a taxi driver, a woman in red, guests at a wedding – dissipate like ghosts. These fraught flickerings work as a sort of portraiture of Agathe and her uncertain future. Her own lived pasts and speculative, unviable futures casts her as a specter and spectator of her own life. The result is moving and energetic. This book holds no punches and offers no soft landings.
Agathe, 6:00 pm to 7:27
Taylor Thornburg
Lost Telegram Press
Eliza Marley is the author of the book You Shouldn’t Worry About the Frogs (Querencia Press 2023). Her work has been featured in Red Ogre Review, Chaotic Merge Magazine, and Stoneboat Journal among others. Eliza is a PhD student in Chicago where she studies fiction, folklore, and ghost stories. She can often be found haunting the Chicago River in a kayak herself.
L'Esprit Literary Review 