How to Break Article Noun

How to Break Article Noun is a carefully crafted work consisting of seven parts, with seven chapters each, intricately interwoven to make up for the absence of a plot. The 2012 Patchen judge, Yuriy Tarnawsky, put it this way: You can break many things, especially the fragile ones, but also feelings and concepts. In her novel Carolyn Chun touches on the subject of breaking the former two, a bottle and a glass fish, but even though she doesn't say it openly, the book is really about the latter: breaking a person's heart and the traditional form of the novel.

I didn't want to have a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with the world. I didn't want to write a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with words, Chun tells the reader in the two-sentence Introduction. The first line, Can you close the door and sit down? Something bad, recurs throughout like a sequence in a Resnais film. The novel brings together pictures, physics formulas, botanical Latin, poetry, and an embedded essay, documenting a precisely rendered case study of two people growing apart.

How to Break Article Noun won the 2012 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, the first novel published under JEF's revived prize. It was chosen for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written, and for an insightful and precisely rendered depiction of a crisis in the life of two human beings.