Siri Hustvedt’s new novel isn’t exactly an easy read — but the casual bookshop browser should be reassured that it’s nowhere near as punishing as the opening pages might suggest. In the ‘editor’s introduction’ we’re told that what follows is an anthology of writings by and about the late artist Harriet Burden — known to friends as Harry — with her own contributions taken from a series of notebooks labelled by letters of the alphabet:

Notebook H, on Edmund Husserl, has pages on Husserl’s idea about ‘the intersubjective constitution of objectivity’ and the consequences of such an idea on the natural...