The Gentle Horror of Kate Zambreno’s Foam

Inspired by the soft sculptures of Eva Hesse, the author’s experimental new novel, published by Semiotext(e), explores the demands of caregiving and work on artistic life

There’s a distinct, lingering atmosphere that settles over the pages of Kate Zambreno’s new novel, Foam – a weight that feels at once ephemeral and suffocating. An experimental novel punctuated with doubles – a multiplying sequence of figures named “Eva” – Foam exists as a space of domestic cataloguing, art criticism and bodily fragmentation; an assemblage of residues, grief and routine. And beneath its sensory observations nestles a sharper, far more terrifying confrontation – “a gentle horror”, as Zambreno puts it: an examination of how contemporary creative existence is drained by capitalist institutions, and how, with the precarity of rental housing and caregiving, we inadvertently reconstruct those same frameworks within the walls of our own homes.

The American novelist, essayist and professor has long been a master of capturing the precarious position of the artist operating at the margins of academia and the gig economy. In Foam, the narrator is an adjunct writing professor without the luxury of maternity leave across two births – the latter depicted in a strange horror-filled pandemic delivery stripped of compassion. The pressure of unrelenting deadlines and classes to cover summer rent fuses institutional logic directly to the domestic walls. The modern machine demands metricised efficiency and a total monetisation of interiority. Creativity dissolves into administrative labour: emails, grants, and constant Zoom presence. Exhausted yet persistent, the narrator navigates these oppressive demands while trying to care for two young children.

The opening of Foam traces the narrator’s transition into postpartum caregiving and the presence of “The Evas” – writing students hired as in-home helpers and assistants for the narrator – but this is no bourgeois nursery memoir. Care is navigated in a rundown, shabby apartment amid landlord hostilities and lead paint. “The Evas” who occupy the first part of the novel are not traditional nannies but former students whose own ambitions, jealousies, and anxieties mirror the narrator’s desire for creative autonomy. Foam’s narrator experiences a profound collision between the gendered expectations of selfless devotion and the pressures of becoming a disembodied parental role model when trying to cover rent and survive. “I’ve had to reason with writing about the exploitation and extraction of adjuncting; to look at these episodes in my life that have brought me the most guilt,” Zambreno tells me over Zoom from their home in New York. “I honestly think there’s no truly ethical way to pay someone else to take care of your child.”

Foam’s scope then broadens into durational performance, material decay, art criticism, institutional violence, and physical breakdown. The narrative shifts in unconventional ways, functioning like the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s description of foam, which is the novel’s epigraph: “Almost nothing, yet not nothing. A something, if only a delicate web of cavities and subtle walls. An actual thing, but a construct fearful of contact that yields and bursts at the slightest touch.” The novel’s form physically transforms, as you read, into its title; fissures and soft structures that reject rigid demands or expectations.

This shift is not without an anchored, deep engagement with feminist art practices and soft sculptures. Zambreno weaves art criticism directly into the fiction, thinking through artist Eva Hesse’s latex and fibreglass works – Repetition 19 and Expanded Expansion – which degrade and rot over time. Hesse’s ethos becomes the intellectual spine: “Life doesn’t last: art doesn’t last” … “I have lost my fear of the ugly.” This obsession with ephemerality and non-form extends to Senga Nengudi’s RSVP – sculptures stretched and weighted by sandbags to reflect the “sagging form after pregnancy” – and Gabriela Salazar’s study of apartment windows that shows “the melancholy of apartment living. The walls become shabby, and only after the tenants disappear, so there’s no trace, do the walls get painted over, as if no one ever existed before,” as Zambreno writes. The name “Eva” rattles and echoes through the text, not merely as the former writing students, but as an expansive motif: the artist Eva Hesse, the cardiologist named Eva, a childhood doll, a friend’s child, a couple’s vibrator, and the mother of a previous lover – multiplying until the self becomes a soft sculpture in flux.

Through this scaffolding, Foam and its language become preoccupied with the body under extreme stress and pressure: postpartum haemorrhaging, repetitive nursing, high blood pressure, the “100-day cough” and a sudden fainting where the narrator collapses on a busy Brooklyn street while clutching a baby. The medical apparatus is no refuge either, delivering cold gaslighting where a cardiologist dismisses heart pain and trauma with automated advice.

Institutional cruelty occurs throughout Foam, as much in the domestic sphere as in the university. Zambreno charts the horror of student suicides – where neoliberal universities respond with hollow wellness initiatives like handing out polyurethane foam stress balls – and the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of middle managers. The novel insists that under capitalism, institutions will never love you; a reminder that you can’t escape the conditions of your own life, nor the conditions of governing institutions and how they hold power, class privilege, and control over you; and you, whatever your creed, might be inadvertently reconstructing facets of a politic you’re against in the most political of all places: your home. We’ve all heard the adage, ‘the personal is political’. Foam is the first novel worthy of that simple yet guttural language, having built an extraordinary, durational monument out of a “wildly interior book” that is fragile and absurd, carved from the residues of physical exhaustion.

Ultimately, Foam stays with the textures of the everyday. It pays exquisite attention to the fragile, useless, and unquantifiable moments of union that resist capitalist capture: the softness of a child’s sweater, the erratic drift of thought, the accumulation of clutter, the tactile sensation of foam itself, and the ephemerality of durational performance and sculpture. “Foam is maybe not the most transformational or optimistic work, but it’s shot through with that gentle horror of pessimism […] Nothing too bad happens, but there’s a bad feeling, alongside the moments of joy which act as a relief from capitalism,” says Zambreno. By centering these fleeting, mutable and anti-capitalist textures, Zambreno acknowledges that while we may never fully untangle our domestic lives from the institutional logic that feeds us, we can still cultivate moments of pleasure within the ruins of a mouldy home.

Zambreno achieves something profoundly tender by turning the very things capitalism dismisses as waste into a sacred liturgy. The brilliance of the novel is that it doesn’t offer any grand political escape route. You and I and Zambreno are stuck in something truer: a clear-eyed account of precarity, domestic captivity, bodily endurance and a delicate insistence on making art out of the very residue of our own enervation.

Foam is out now, published by Semiotext(e)