A will to write, to describe, to paint with words, to engage with art, to make one. Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is a projection of a woman and her impulse and desire to write. Her name is Vitória. She works as a janitor in a gallery, and making a close acquaintance with her working partner, Antoinette. She looks at paintings during her hours of cleaning, trying to make notes, only to find herself describing Antoinette. Or, projecting her aesthetic experience and desire.

I wrote down my descriptions of the paintings, my notes, but I wasn’t sure what I would do with them. The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet, The Annunciation, Margaretha van Haexbergen.

Then I would see Antoinette, looking at herself in the mirror in the bathroom, careless, her sponge on the floor. In the courtyard in her—it was true—ugly coat. I started to write descriptions of her, the things she did when she was supposed to be cleaning, the way she looked when she spoke or was silent. I liked doing this as much as I liked describing the paintings, but I didn’t tell her I was doing it. I didn’t talk about writing at all. She continued to tell me the things she wanted, that she had seen in the shops. Sometimes I wrote these things down in my notebook too. In my mind I began to picture her in the clothes she wanted, as if the intensity of her desire had made them appear. Very clearly, I saw her in a maroon dress.

And then she climbs a fragile ladder after marrying a wealthy man, so she can write. Antoinette witnesses her early conviction: “I don’t care if I marry […] I want to write.” But her problem is not automatically resolved. Even when she now has a place and time to write, her husband’s arrogance breaks her bit-by-bit. She remains, after all, unfree. What she often do is waiting: “Finally my husband left for work; now I would have some space.” Also, her encounter with Solange, a low-class woman working as her husband’s household worker, put Vitória’s status on check: her own poor origin, her wannabe upper-middle-class dream, her guilt. Solange’s cold and uncaring presence interrupts her supposedly elegant and graceful desire, making it more vulgar, rougher, more violent. Nothing is apparently refined, nor delicate on Vitória’s path of opening, creating, and dwelling in her room.

This novel does not allow readers to sense the consistency of fineness in Vitória’s interactions with others. Even in many gentle moments of her with Dana, her dancer friend, or when she reunites with Antoinette and watching her friend making home and family, there are subtle tensions that suspend a warm feeling of friendship. Dana is the closest one and yet, there’s still a thin veil covering their encounter. Holding up. It is only when Vitória is alone that we can see her tenderness toward her art. Fineness is when she has and owns the room. She might meet moments of doubt and anxiety, a kind of timidity coming from her lack of cultural capital; she steps back to move forward, detouring first before on forwarding with her words. She’s becoming. And in her becoming, “the soul makes room.”

The dry, icy, eerie yet precise sentences of Cain allow me to see that a place of soul is not always dictated by courses of life narrative but also reconstructed by matters of sentences that create lingering images. As Cain shares on her essay on writing, A Horse at Night: “I would rather work in front of or behind a narrative, where I can focus on these other things even if the story is still there. I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind. I want to write what heightened experience feels like.” She looks at paintings, and then she paints. Her sentences are not overtly lyrical. Her scenery brushes are free yet restrained, carefully tended. “A cucumber, melons, butter lettuce, an apple. Why is what we have left on a table worthy of being painted? No matter. It waits for our return, for when we will take it up again. Now I will eat once more.” It’s a still-life picture.

Around her relationship with writing within life within writing, Cain declares what she wants from sentences. “I am not always writing a sentence to tell a story, exactly, but simply to be in the space of a sentence, to make things appear in it, to see what is possible.” This part might be amusing for readers who avoid and to some extent despise a mode of treating prose literature as full-blown fine art and less as storytelling. The notion of “to be in the space of a sentence” is an abstraction, a figurative gesture in which the pause and flow of sentence allows multiple, spiralling feelings to be hold. It wants to carry junctures of sustenance and suspension, like poetry. I once thought perhaps it doesn’t matter how a sentence come to be, as long as it moves the narration, as long as the story flows. But ripples of sound and syntax, semantic and content, that make a sentence often turn into a huge wave; it amazes us, fascinates us. Sometimes we’re swept away. If story and narration makes us through, what does a sentence do?

As I read Cain’s A Horse at Night back and forth with Indelicacy, I ponder upon the possibilities of letting a sentence does what it can and might do. Is writing enough? Cain attempts to answer the question through Renee Gladman, whose book Calamities I read thanks to Cain’s reference. Writing as a picture-feeling. Gladman draws. But Cain does not. She looks, gazes, and wonders about drawings and paintings, then translating the act of composing and stroking by trying and forging her writing. The mechanics matter less than the osmosis of language, life, and everything in between. To be urgent and concealing; that’s what sentence and writing do. Both impression and meaning of what we read carry the same weight, although they might bring different tension and intensity. I think it is Cain’s personal task (if not ambition) to upstage a kind of “intimacy without grasping” and grabbing. And perhaps a full paragraph, with echoing, unfolding sentences, for now, is enough to express such a will. A will to write.

WRITE INTO THE WINTER, AND THE SUMMER, and autumn, and spring. Write into the snow and flowers and the wreaths and the wallpaper. Write into the painting and the flame of the long candle. Write into your own mind, turning and turning it. Write into L’Homme Assis Dans Le Couloir. Write into the floor, the wide planks of the mind. Write into the circular gravel driveway that brings your characters to you, that brings them to life. Write into the buffalo and the hare and the dog. Write into the bulb with a miniature pasture painted onto it that hangs on the tree. The bulb of grass outside the house. The buckwheat that is growing in the evening. Write into your eyes. The lamp that sits on the table in the evening. You can see it in the mirror. A pale shade of pink. Write into falling snow, falling rain, falling leaves. Write into the dark stove. A bird of paradise. Write into the ceiling and the scalloped edge. Write into a drawing of a necklace. People praying in church. Write into the cane. The needle and the cloth. Into the times you were unhappy. Write into the fuchsia and black dress. The neckline is low. The cats, curled into little balls on the bed. The endless study. Write into your laziness. Write into the dark lines of the room. Write into the movie you watched. Write into the tall ceilings. The others who were in the room. This tree that is itself in the shape of a ball. Into the shapes around it. Write into the holiday. Into the hedges that line the walk.