Dept. of Speculation by Jenny OffillMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.
With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.
With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.
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I came across this book recently when reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works; he spoke fondly of Jenny Offil’s second novel, and I love more ‘experimental’ literary styles, so I decided to give it a go.
This is a constantly shifting epistolary novel told in fragments and snatches about hope and grief and life. It follows an unnamed narrator as she gets married, becomes a mother, discovers her husband is having an affair, and then how their relationship eventually survives it. Time is ever-shifting in this novel, and it’s the first book I’ve read where the narration mode changes swiftly and deftly (the woman is both ‘I’ and the husband ‘you’; they become ‘the wife’ and ‘the husband’ when she discovers his affair, before the first-person narrative resumes at the end when their relationship is beginning to repair.
There are a lot of profound thoughts in this book, and the writing is simply beautiful.
View all my reviews
I came across this book recently when reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works; he spoke fondly of Jenny Offil’s second novel, and I love more ‘experimental’ literary styles, so I decided to give it a go.
This is a constantly shifting epistolary novel told in fragments and snatches about hope and grief and life. It follows an unnamed narrator as she gets married, becomes a mother, discovers her husband is having an affair, and then how their relationship eventually survives it. Time is ever-shifting in this novel, and it’s the first book I’ve read where the narration mode changes swiftly and deftly (the woman is both ‘I’ and the husband ‘you’; they become ‘the wife’ and ‘the husband’ when she discovers his affair, before the first-person narrative resumes at the end when their relationship is beginning to repair.
There are a lot of profound thoughts in this book, and the writing is simply beautiful.
View all my reviews
