Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy!

I am particularly excited for the release of Discipline. I wasn’t familiar with Larissa Pham before reading this, but I think Discipline has the potential to be a big book in the literary community.

Discipline centers a disillusioned artist who claims she quit painting due to the misconduct of her MFA professor and the twisted relationship they had. The plot begins by following her as she talks to people around the U.S. on a book tour for a novel she wrote about the professor ordeal. I would describe her narration as cold and distant, but reachable through the prose.

I think the only thing I wanted more from this one was a clearer meditation on the protagonist’s difficult logic. As in, a clearer break of what she refuses to see in herself and others. For example, I couldn’t tell whether she knew what she wanted by the end of the novel or whether she actually knew why she quit painting. She was both detached and childish, which played more awkwardly for me than compelling.

At only 140 pages, I was able to read this in one sitting, though I feel it would be enjoyable over a longer period since the novel covers a lot of time. There are a lot of ways to interpret both the plot and the protagonist, so I’d be super interested in discussing this one with others. The sort of disconnected narration reminded me of Katie Kitamura’s writing, particularly Intimacies. It is my understanding that Pham has been mostly writing nonfiction, so I am excited to read more novels from her.

I found Discipline remarkably compelling. Christine’s internal struggle about control and creativity felt deeply authentic. The prose was elegant and charged with quiet tension, drawing me in from the first page. I loved how Pham wove ideas about art, memory, and identity into a narrative that felt both intimate and unsettling. It was intellectually engaging and emotionally resonant.

For many years, I refused to read novels about writers. As a novelist, I thought the subject was perhaps the last resort of the unimaginative. In the last couple of years, however, I've been drawn to novels about writers--including the gorgeous Don't Be a Stranger by Susan Minot, The Overnight Guest by Heather Gudenkauf, and The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz. Now I'm hooked.

I was fortunate to snag a review copy of Discipline, the debut novel by the author of the essay collection Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy. The novel opens with the narrator, Christine, losing her luggage on a cobbled-together tour for her second book.

Discipline is comprised of a series of conversations about writing, art, and the after-effects of the narrator’s affair with a professor, “the old painter,” which led her to drop out of art school years before. The professor appears in the narrator’s first novel, and the fictional version of him comes to a terrible end. The real-life professor contacts the narrator while she’s on tour for the second book, after discovering his fictional murder. If it sounds like a bit of origami, it is. At times it feels as if the narrator is talking directly about the novel we’re reading, even though she is ostensibly talking about the first novel, the (fictional) novel-within-the-novel.

The writer-protagonist of Discipline speaks frankly about how much of ourselves writers put into our work, and how blurred the line between fiction and autobiography can become.

I find the directness and simplicity of Phan’s writing appealing, and the conversations about writing and being on book tour feel like a walk through a familiar landscape. Anyone who has lived for a time in the literary world will recognize the unglamorous life of the author trying to sell a few books. The power dynamic between “the old painter” and the narrator during her student years will, no doubt, feel like a page torn from the personal histories of many women who pursued degrees in creative writing and the arts in a different, looser era. The narrator speaks at length about the writing life in a way that is instantly recognizable and, for those of us long in the trenches, nostalgic.