Book Report: Dept. of Speculation

14. Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014) (3/11/21)

I've had this book for years—I assume, since I have it in hardcover. The other day my friend Nina mentioned reading Offill's newest book, said she really admired her, said she loved Dept. of Speculation. I thought I knew where on my shelves this book might be (it was). It is a small book—physically small in inches, only 177 pages, lots of white space inside. My favorite kind of book: easily gulp-downable. But also, even better: an exquisite little jewel.

It is, in a phrase, the story of a marriage. The meeting, the falling in love, the marrying, the having of a child. That's the first half, all narrated in the first person. Then things shift. The husband has an affair, and the narrator is no longer an "I" but "the wife." Her distraughtness, even at moments craziness, her loss of identity, her despair, woven into the necessary carrying-on. And the effort to get through. Which, it seems, they do—or she does, for the last page of the book is again in the "I" voice, and that suggests that he has come along, into a new phase of existence together. 

The writing is inventive, sensitive, playful, searching. Offill invokes many (many) writers and quotations or anecdotes to tell this woman's story. I made a list. Rilke earns top spot for the number of mentions, followed by John Berryman, then Carl Sagan. Also Einstein and Edison, the Stoics and the Manicheans, Hesiod and Horace, Darwin and Martin Luther, Emily Dickinson and Simone Weil. The list does go on, and the quotes are so fitting in the context of this woman's state of mind.

The story is told in short chapters, which in turn are made up of short chunks (rarely are there multiple paragraphs in one of those chunks). It's an episodic stream of consciousness, but it all adds up. Here are a few examples—just passages I flagged because they're lovely. The first two are from "before," the second two from "after."

My husband comes into the bathroom, holding a hammer. He is talking, reciting a litany of household things. "I fixed the wobbly chair," he tells me. "And I put a mat under the rug so that it won't ride up again. The toilet needs a new washer, though. It won't stop running." This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won't just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.

Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to make yourself more seriously.

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Once ether was everywhere. The crook of an arm, say. (Also, the heavens.) It slowed the movement of the stars, told the left hand where the right hand went. Then it was gone, like hysteria, like the hollow earth. The news came over the radio. There is only air now. Abandon your experiments.

I'd quote the last hopeful page too, but maybe you should go read the book.