Review: Dept. of Speculation
After a string of thick, committed relationship-style books, I recently had the rare pleasure of reading one in just half a day. Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (which you may have glimpsed me beginning, curled up on my couch on an almost-rainy-enough day a few days ago on Instagram) truly flew. A solid read, enhanced by mellifluous writing, it was good enough to keep me constantly curious about the central character (a woman who grows from 20-something newlywed to middle-aged mother over the course of the novel) but not so captivating that I was sad when it was over. It was a perfect, pocket-sized glimpse into an imperfect marriage, and a tale so inwardly focused that we never even learn the names of any of the characters, including the narrator.
It’s apparent pretty immediately that this is not going to be a purely happy story; instead, it will focus on the unraveling—the extent of which we don’t know in the first few chapters—of a marriage that seems, in the early pages, solid.
Perhaps the most interesting (and also the most frustrating) aspect of this novel is its jumping, stream-of-consciousness narration. It takes a while to settle into a chronology; the narrator hops from memory to memory dizzyingly. It’s confusing, and it yields a kind of seasickness—the reader is unable to anchor herself in time or space until suddenly she lands, hard, in the beginning of the novel’s central (and, really, only) love story.
That early roving creates a sense of imbalance that I assigned to the narrator herself. Frequently, she hints darkly at not being quite well; when she’s on vacation in Capri, she mentions, off-handedly, that her being there would maybe “fix my brain.” When she is at home with her husband and her new daughter, she wonders if her love for her little family will fix the “crookedness in my heart.” I pounced on these clues early on, ready for the story of the narrator’s unraveling by her own hands (or, more accurately, by her own mind).
That unraveling never comes, though, and I finished the book wondering why the “clues” were there in the first place—perhaps only to show the complexities of a human character and to strip the reader’s faithful trust in the narrator. That would be an interesting angle for a reader—not to fully trust the narrator’s side of things, particularly when she reveals the pivotal moment in her marriage: her husband’s infidelity. As the shadowy shapes of that story emerged, I kept waiting for fault or misunderstanding or another revelation on the part of the narrator. That didn’t come either, though, and I was disappointed that this was another story about cheating, and that the husband (who had been carefully constructed as a charming, loving nerd in the earlier chapters) was a much flatter character than I had believed. The most interesting part of the affair was, again, the style of the narration: the author shifts from referring to herself and her husband as “you” and “I” to “the husband” and “the wife.” It’s an effective way to demonstrate her complete loss of agency in the face of his betrayal.
The affair and its aftermath takes up most of the second half of the book, which was disappointing to me, because the earlier half was so delightful. Offill’s funniest and most insightful moments came when she was describing her daughter: first as a baby, and then as a toddler (descriptions of the young girl fade in later pages, eclipsed by the trauma within her parents’ marriage). I loved Offill’s dry humor as she described this curious little girl, who was serious and smart and exhausting and adored all at once. I find that most descriptions of fictional babies treat them as loveable dolls, with “toothy grins,” “sharp cries,” “sweet smells,” etc. But this baby was so serious and utterly unlike a typical baby that she became, paradoxically, even more real. I hoped and expected to read more about her and her relationship with the narrator as they grew up, but I think the novel I wanted to read did not end up being the novel that Offill wanted to write. I wish it had been, because I think she could have done a wonderful, funny, touching job. In the end, I liked this book very much, and I enjoyed reading it, but I was disappointed that the twisting, hopping, crackling plot settled into somewhat of a cliché.
Boston Bookworm Rating: 4/5
