There were moments in A Horse at Night when I felt Cain was touching on something real, something worth saying.
Her reflections on the changes that come with age, the corresponding rigidity, fear and loss of “authenticity”, certainly rang true, while her description of the difference it makes to experience a thing alone is, although not ground-breaking, well put: “When another person is accompanying you, they fill the space between you and certain kinds of experience … It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood.”
Yet, overwhelmingly, this book gave me an impression of obfuscation, almost as though Cain were performing a trick, saying one thing about writing while doing its opposite. The constant referencing of other art (a frustrating and prevalent issue with women’s intellectual non-fiction writing at the moment), hypothetical questions (“can we envision thought, thinking?”), and unrelenting distance of self (in what claimed to be “a diary of fiction”), left me unsatisfied and adrift.
This was especially notable when read against her repeatedly stated desire to express emotions such as pleasure, freedom, torment, emptiness, shame, humiliation, closeness, intimacy and vulnerability. Or, more succinctly, “things that would … embarrass me”, all of which were entirely absent here (sure, this isn’t fiction, but meaningful and engaging personal nonfiction must also contain at least some of these elements).
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There are little glimpses of Cain, but mostly they’re too safe to actually tell us anything; she meditates, adores dusk, cherishes her friends, loves plants. The only truly revealing detail came with a description of how, every morning, when one of her cats reaches the end of its food, she squats down to feed him the last pieces by hand, one by one.
At one point, Cain describes another work, Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías, as “a little distant, cold, sure of itself”. Later, she admits: “I have not gone far enough, in my writing or my life, and in that way I haven’t told the truth.” These are perfect summations of what’s gone wrong here. I really wanted to love this. I respect Daunt Book’s titles and admire Cain’s intelligence. Unfortunately, for me, it just wasn’t quite there.
