But with Sight I felt the difference between a book written for someone like me and a book actually written for me. Sometimes when reading something I sense I’m the target audience for I get restive and grumpy, frustrated at having been pigeonholed, no matter how accurately. I don’t think it was just because I was squeezing the book into the ends of my mid-semester days that I often found myself going back and re-reading. Greengrass’s sentences are often long and always, as the example above suggests, complex. Reading it, in fact, I often had the rare, even uncanny feeling that the book was written just for me, which made me both eager to plough through it and reluctant to finish. (If you want a lot of plot you will not love this book.) But definitely to mine. At others it’s a compelling example of what people are calling autofiction (at least, I think so: I’m not actually sure what that means). I almost wrote, “to the heart of Greengrass’s argument.” For Sight at times masquerades as an essay. Although I’m reluctant to think of novels as having keys-it suggests they’re problems to be solved, secrets to be transgressed-this sentence gets to the heart of the book. So concludes the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s marvelous novel Sight (2018). There is nothing more horrible than this: a world elucidated and all that is seen, understood.
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