Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill 9/9/2018 5:57:37 PM
A Review of Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (January 28, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385350813
ISBN-13: 978-0385350815 *********************************************************************
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Wife
The American Psychological Association (APA) estimates that 40-50% of all marriages end in divorce. This is an often-cited statistic, and one that is frequently bandied about when a certain segment of the population decries the disintegration of the American family unit. Similarly, according to the Small Business Association (SBA), 30% of all businesses fail within the first two years, 50% during the first five, and two-thirds of businesses go under within the first ten years of operation. The management of a family—of a marriage—is not all that different than managing a business; there’s profitability to consider, net gains, and it helps if the principles have a shared vision. Ultimately, the success or failure of the business depends on the strength of the partnership and a mutual dedication to the long-term goals.
In Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, we track the life of a marriage from its idealistic beginnings to its gloomy détente. Told in a spare, minimalist—though never-less-than-hauntingly beautiful—style, Offill follows The Wife—a professor of creative writing at an unnamed Brooklyn college—as she muses about space and time and references snippets of Buddhist wisdom in what initially seem to be unrelated fragments of inner monologue; however, as the novel plows on, these fragments slowly assemble into a plot as if a great mountain slowly revealed through fog. The characters are never named—save for a suicidal student of the Wife’s named Lia; instead, they are known as the Husband, the Daughter, the Ex-boyfriend, the Philosopher; and the Girl. The material is so raw here, the reader wonders if the author herself had at one-time gone through a similar experience and felt the need to keep an authorial distance from her subject.
At one point in the novel, the narrative shifts from the 1st person to a close 3rd person, as the Wife begins referring to herself in the third-person to shield herself (and reader) from the shrapnel of her husband’s affair. In this dissociation—which includes the Wife’s feeling of floating outside of her body at night—the reader views the character from the outside and witnesses her slow deterioration in her actions rather than her thoughts. It’s an especially effective means to tell the story when an author is handling such hot materials. Through the course of the novel, we see the Wife go from an object of desire—young and fertile—to a wife and mother (her hair now streaked with gray), struggling to balance the juggling act of wife, mother, and teacher, all the while trying to keep alive her own career as a writer and desire to be an “art monster.”
While the prose is sparse and there are nearly equal amounts of white space on the page, don’t be fooled; the glimpses into the Wife’s domestic life has an accumulative effect, and the end result is devastating. Ms. Offill is a gifted writer and the reader is never less than confident in where she is leading him/her. Hemingway is famously quoted as saying, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” Offhill has written an entire novel of true sentences here, each one truer than the last, and these snatches of prose that cross the page like an ice flow in a river are evidence of the old aristotelian adage, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s quite a magnificent achievement. Dept. of Speculation is Ms. Offill’s second novel, coming fourteen years after her debut, Last Things. Here’s hoping we won’t have to wait as long for her next book.
