Dept. of speculation

Review by New York Times Review

Offill's slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction - on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and motherhood and infidelity; and especially love and the grueling rigors of domestic life. Part elegy and part primal scream, it's a profound and unexpectedly buoyant performance.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 21, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

This is a magnetic novel about a marriage of giddy bliss and stratospheric anxiety, bedrock alliance and wrenching tectonic shifts. Offill, author of the novel Last Things (1999) and various children's books, covers this shifting terrain and its stormy weather in an exquisitely fine-tuned, journal-like account narrated by the wife, an ironic self-designation rooted in her growing fears about her marital state. She is smart if a bit drifty, imaginative and selectively observant, and so precisely articulate that her perfect, simple sentences vibrate like violin strings. And she is mordantly funny, a wry taxonomist of emotions and relationships. Her dispatches from the fog of new motherhood are hilarious and subversive. Her cynical pursuit of self-improvement is painfully accurate. Her Richter-scale analysis of the aftershocks of infidelity is gripping. Nothing depicted in this portrait of a family in quiet disarray is unfamiliar in life or in literature, and that is the artistic magic of Offill's stunning performance. She has sliced life thin enough for a microscope slide and magnified it until it fills the mind's eye and the heart.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Popping prose and touching vignettes of marriage and motherhood fill Offill's (Last Things) slim second book of fiction. Clever, subtle, and rife with strokes of beauty, this book is both readable in a single sitting and far ranging in the emotions it raises. The 46 short chapters are told mostly in brief fragments and fly through the life of the nameless heroine. Her mind wanders from everyday tasks and struggles, the beginnings of her marriage, the highs and lows with her husband, the joys of having a daughter. These domestic bits are contrasted by far-flung thoughts that whirl in every direction, from space aviation and sea exploration to ancient philosophy and Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics. Anecdotes and quotes also come from all over: Einstein, Eliot, Keats, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. Often, the use of third person places the heroine at a distance, examining the macro-reality of her life, but then Offill will zoom in, giving the reader a view into her heroine's inner life-notes, graded papers and corrected manuscripts, monologues, imagined Christmas cards and questionnaires. Offill has equal parts cleverness and erudition, but it's her language and eye for detail that make this a must-read: "Just after she turns five my daughter starts making confessions to me. It seems she is noticing her thoughts as thoughts for the first time and wants absolution.... I thought of stepping on her foot, but I didn't. I tried to make her a little bit jealous. I pretended to be mad at him. 'Everybody has bad thoughts,' I tell her. 'Just try not to act on them.' " (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

At first, the fragmentary nature of this second novel by Offill (Last Things) makes it difficult to fit the pieces into a whole. As the work progresses, however, listeners are presented with the story of a marriage, of motherhood, and of trying to write the elusive second novel. The unnamed wife, whose tale this is, weaves the narrative fragments into an eventually moving and compelling portrait of her life in Brooklyn, a life in which she must attempt to balance her roles as spouse, mother, and author while keeping herself whole. Not all authors read their own work well, but Offill does so here in a nuanced performance that helps the listener keep track of the narrative fragments. VERDICT Highly recommended. ["Offill's lean prose and the addition of astute quotations prevent the text from becoming just one more story of an infidelity. Her writing is exquisitely honed and vibrant," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ 11/1/13.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Scenes from a marriage, sometimes lyrical, sometimes philosophically rich, sometimes just puzzling. If Rainer Maria Rilke had written a novel about marriage, it might look something like this: a series of paragraphs, seldom exceeding more than a dozen lines, sometimes without much apparent connection to the text on either side. The story is most European, too; says the narrator, "I spent my afternoons in a city park, pretending to read Horace. At dusk, people streamed out of the Mtro and into the street. In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful." Well, oui. The principal character is "the wife," nameless but not faceless, who enters into a relationship and then marriage with all the brave hope attendant in the enterprise. Offill (Last Things, 1999, etc.) is fond of pointed apothegms ("Life equals structure plus activity") and reflections in the place of actual action, but as the story progresses, it's clear that events test that hope--to say nothing of hubby's refusal at first to pull down a decent salary, so the young family finds itself "running low on money for diapers and beer and potato chips." Material conditions improve, but that hope gets whittled away further with the years, leading to moments worthy of a postmodern version of Diary of a Mad Housewife: "The wife is reading Civilization and Its Discontents, but she keeps getting lost in the index." The fragmented story, true though it may be to our splintered, too busy lives, is sometimes hard to follow, and at times, the writing is precious, even if we're always pulled back into gritty reality: "I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain. When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease." There are moments of literary experimentation worthy of Virginia Woolf here, but in the end, this reads more like notes for a novel than a novel itself.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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There is a man who travels around the world trying to find places where you can stand still and hear no human sound. It is impossible to feel calm in cities, he believes, because we so rarely hear birdsong there. Our ears evolved to be our warning systems. We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching. The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three. Blue jays spend every Friday with the devil, the old lady at the park told me. "You need to get out of that stupid city," my sister said. "Get some fresh air." Four years ago, she and her husband left. They moved to Pennsylvania to an old ramshackle house on the Delaware River. Last spring, she came to visit me with her kids. We went to the park; we went to the zoo; we went to the planetarium. But still they hated it. Why is everyone yelling here? * * * He is famously kind, my husband. Always sending money to those afflicted with obscure diseases or shoveling the walk of the crazy neighbor or helloing the fat girl at Rite Aid. He's from Ohio. This means he never forgets to thank the bus driver or pushes in front at the baggage claim. Nor does he keep a list of those who infuriate him on a given day. People mean well. That is what he believes. How then is he married to me? I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves "comfortable" when what they mean is decadently rich. You're so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it. Later, I am talking on the phone to my sister. I walk outside with the baby on my shoulders. She reaches out, puts something in her mouth, and chokes on it. "Hold her upside down!" my sister yells. "Whack her hard on the back!" And I do until the leaf, green, still beautiful, comes out in my hand. I develop an abiding interest in emergency precautions. I try to enlist my husband's help in this. I ask him to carry a pocketknife and a small flashlight in his backpack. Ideally, I'd like him to have one of those smoke hoods that doubles as a parachute. (If you are rich and scared enough you can buy one of these, I have read.) He thinks I have a morbid imagination. Nothing's going to happen, he says. But I want him to make promises. I want him to promise that if something happens he won't try to save people, that he'll just get home as fast as he can. He looks shaken by this request, but still I monster on about it. Leave behind the office girl and the old lady and the fat man wheezing on the stairs . Come home, I tell him. Save her. A few days later the baby sees the garden hose come on and we hear her laughing. All my life now appears to be one happy moment . This is what the first man in space said. Later, when it's time to go to bed, she puts both legs in one side of her footy pajamas and slyly waits for us to notice. There is a picture of my mother holding me as a baby, a look of naked love on her face. For years, it embarrassed me. Now there is a picture of me with my daughter looking exactly the same way. We dance with the baby every night now, spinning her round and round the kitchen. Dizzying, this happiness. She becomes obsessed with balls. She can spot a ball-shaped object at one hundred paces. Ball , she calls the moon. Ball . Ball . On nights when it is obscured by clouds, she points angrily at the darkness. My husband gets a new job, scoring sound tracks for commercials. The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. "Not bad," he says with a shrug. "Only vaguely soul-crushing." She learns to walk. We decide to have a party to show off how persony she has become. For days beforehand, she asks me over and over, "Party now? Party now?" On the night of the festivities, I pull her wispy hair up into a ponytail. "She looks like a girl," my husband says. He seems amazed. An hour later, the guests stream in. She weaves her way in and out of them for five minutes, then tugs on my sleeve. "No more party!" she says. "Party done! Party done!" Her favorite book is about firemen. When she sees the picture, she will mime ringing the bell and sliding down the pole. Clang, clang, clang goes the fire engine bell. The men are on their way! My husband reads the book to her every night, including very very slowly the entire copyright page. Sometimes she plays a game now where she scatters her stuffed animals all over the living room. "Babies, babies," she mutters darkly as she covers them with white napkins. "Civil War Battlefield," we call it. One day she runs down the block by herself. I am terrified she'll forget to stop at the end. "Stop!" I scream at her. "Stop! Stop!" "Just keep her alive until she's eighteen," my sister says. My sister has two daredevil boys, fraternal twins. She lives in the country but is always threatening to move to England. Her husband is British. He would like to solve all their problems with boarding school and compulsory backgammon. He has never liked it here. Weak-minded, he calls Americans. To make him happy, my sister serves boiled meat for dinner and makes the peas mushy. * * * People keep flirting with the wife. Has this been happening all along and she never noticed? Or is it new? She's like a taxi whose light just went on. All these men standing in the street, waving her over. She falls in love with a friend. She falls in love with a student. She falls in love with the bodega man. He hands her back her change so gently. Floating, yes, floating away. How can he sleep? Doesn't he feel her levitating? I will leave you, my love. Already I am going. Already I watch you speaking as if from a great height. Already the feel of your hand on my hand, of your lips on my lips, is only curious. It is decided then. The stars are accelerating. I half remember a sky could look like this. I saw it once when she was born. I saw it once when I got sick. I thought you'd have to die before I saw it again. I thought one of us would have to die. But look, here it is! Who will help me? Who can help me? Rilke? Rilke! If you're listening, come quickly. Lash me to this bed! Bind me to this earthly body! If you hear this, come now! I am untethering. Who can hold me? What John Berryman said: Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You're in the clear . These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs. Lately, the wife has been thinking about God, in whom the husband no longer believes. The wife has an idea to meet her ex-boyfriend at the park. Maybe they could talk about God. Then make out. Then talk about God again. She tells the yoga teacher that she is trying to be honorable. Honorable! Such an old-fashioned word, she thinks. Ridiculous, ridiculous. "Yes, be honorable," the yoga teacher says. Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days. Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it. So she invents allergies to explain her red eyes and migraines to explain the blinked-back look of pain. One day, coming out of their building, she staggers a little from the exhaustion of all of it. Her elderly neighbor comes over, touches her sleeve. "Are you okay, dear?" he asks. Carefully, politely, she shakes him off of her. Sometimes when the wife is trying to do positions, the yoga teacher will single her out for instruction. The wife can't help but notice that she never has to correct other students in this particular way. Do not instruct the head! The head is not being instructed! 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. * * * The undergrads get the suicide jokes, but the ones about divorce go right over their heads. You're a truth bomb, a cute guy said to her once at a party. Before excusing himself to go flirt with someone else. Q. Why couldn't the Buddhist vacuum in corners? A. Because she had no attachments. The wife is advised to read a horribly titled adultery book. She takes the subway three neighborhoods away to buy it. The whole experience of reading it makes her feel compromised, and she hides it around the house with the fervor another might use to hide a gun or a kilo of heroin. In the book, he is referred to as the participating partner and she as the hurt one. There are many other icky things, but there is one thing in the book that makes her laugh out loud. It is in a footnote about the way different cultures handle repairing a marriage after an affair. In America, the participating partner is likely to spend an average of 1,000 hours processing the incident with the hurt partner. This cannot be rushed. When she reads this, the wife feels very very sorry for the husband. Who is only about 515 hours in. * * * The weather is theater here. They watch it through the window from their bed. What Singer said: I wonder what these people thought thousands of years ago of these sparks they saw when they took off their woolen clothes? The husband feeds the stove so she can stay in bed. He goes outside to get more wood. The sky looks like snow, he says. Saint Anthony was said to suffer from a crippling despair. When he prayed to be freed from it, he was told that any physical task done in the proper spirit would bring him deliverance. At dinner, the wife watches the husband as he peels an apple for the daughter in a perfect spiral. Later, when she is grading papers, she comes across a student's story with the same image in it. The father and daughter, the apple, the Swiss Army knife. Uncanny really. Beautifully written. She checks for a name, but there is nothing. Lia, she thinks. It must be Lia. She goes outside to read it to the husband. "I wrote that," he says. "I slipped it into your papers to see if you would notice." The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention . The visitor was displeased. "Is that all?" So Ikkyu obliged him. Two words now. Attention. Attention. Sometimes the wife still watches him sleep. Sometimes she still strokes his hair in the middle of the night and half asleep he turns to her. Their daughter runs through the woods now, her face painted like an Indian. Excerpted from Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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