Care, critique, and contemporary literature: the offerings of Sarah Moss’s Tidal Zone

This article explores what contemporary literature has to offer in the face of the crisis of care and draws some theoretical coordinates for a care-oriented literary criticism. Specifically, it focusses on Sarah Moss’s novel Tidal Zone (2016), which captures the experiential and embodied aspects of care, while also providing a profound critique of the slashing of care infrastructures under austerity. On a theoretical level, my article suggests that reading for care offers the possibility to shift back and forth between the skepticism of critique and the affirmative, reparative mood of post-critique, since care – as a concept, as a practice, as a lived experience – clearly affords both. Drawing on Levine’s work on political and aesthetic forms, I argue that care is not just the novel’s thematic focus but also its organising principle, as it relies on a flat, non-hierarchical, and web-like form of storytelling, mirroring the ‘connected lives’Footnote1 of carers, and recurring rhythmic, cyclical structures, which echo the cyclical, open-ended character of care-work.