What is the author's style in the book, After Sappho?

The author uses fragments in After Sappho to help contextualize the novel’s characters within a wider tradition of lesbianism, feminism, and radical opposition. Throughout the novel, Schwartz utilizes short narrative snippets that each focus on a certain individual, event, publication, or law. The narrative becomes a cascade of fragments, flowing together into a complex and inextricable whole. Importantly, this formal choice echoes the work of the ancient poetess Sappho, whose verses exist only in fragments. By willingly adopting this fragmentary form, Schwartz places both herself and her characters within the tradition of Sappho and lesbian artists more generally. The novel’s title assumes a dual meaning; while the characters in After Sappho live many centuries after Sappho’s death, they also model their work after that of Sappho. The fragments literalize the connection between the novel’s characters and the ancient poetess, thereby creating a continual, unbroken strand that stretches across time and space.