Dept. of Speculation
— 2014 —
New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2014; 177 pages
FIRST LINES
Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.
It was still months before we’d tell each other all our stories. And even then some seemed too small to bother with. So why do they come back to me now? Now, when I’m so weary of all of it.
Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. Little people, Edison called them. Entities. He had a theory about where they came from and that theory was outer space.
PLOT SUMMARY
A young mother, also an ambitious writer, is struggling. She struggles with her baby, who is only quiet when carried through the aisles at Rite Aid. She struggles to write a second book, especially as people keep asking her where it is. And eventually, she struggles in her marriage. It is a perfect trifecta of suffering.
Highly original and deeply felt, this novella is told mostly in a series of brief observations, almost aphorisms. In one of them, the nameless narrator explains:
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.
For the nameless writer-wife-mother—not necessarily in that order—who narrates, the misery and suffering alternate among these three separate identities. She had come to New York to be a writer—an “art monster” with no plans for marriage. Or motherhood. “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”
But life intruded. First comes love, an apartment, a book, then a baby. As we move through a succession of her sometimes wry, witty, often-poignant thought bubbles, they gather in intensity.
The mood darkens further with the revelation that the narrator-writer’s marriage goes rocky. The near-gallows humor of those baby days—when the best part of yoga class is pretending to be dead for ten minutes—is about to be replaced by growing rage.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JENNY OFFILL
Look up “Auspicious beginnings” and you might find Jenny Offill, though she would probably disagree. But three at bats and three home runs count as a rather notable statistical average in a novelist’s career. Even if it did take fifteen years after the first home run to hit the second.
Born in Massachusetts in 1968, Offill is the child of boarding school teachers. They moved around, and she was raised variously in California, Indiana, and North Carolina, where she finished high school and went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She later studied at Stanford as a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. Then, like many aspiring writers, she spent years doing odd jobs, including waitressing, fact-checking, and ghostwriting.
Her first novel, Last Things (1999) while not commercially successful, was a critical success, named by the New York Times as one of the Notable Books of the Year. Dept. of Speculation followed, more than a decade later. During the gap, Offill taught writing at various colleges and universities and produced a children’s book.
“There are many autobiographical things in the book,” Offill told National Public Radio in a 2014 interview. “The obvious thing that people gravitate towards is whether or not I’m the wife and my husband is the husband. And the truth is really much duller: that we haven’t had anything so dramatic happen to us, although, like any couple, of course, we’ve had our moments where things seem to wobble.”
The wait for a third novel was not quite as long. In 2020, she published Weather, a book that uses techniques similar to Dept. of Speculation to address the climate crisis and nothing less than the fate of the earth.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
It is a fitting accident that this novel follows Mann’s. Both explore the writer’s challenge—in very different styles and a century apart.
Reading Offill’s unique and engaging novella, I felt I was moving through territory also explored by Elena Ferrante in The Lost Daughter, Doris Lessing in The Fifth Child, and Michael Cunningham in The Hours (see entries): the power, weight, and costs of motherhood. Offill probes the burden of this life, as well as the writer’s struggle to create, in her peculiarly fragmented yet highly effective style.
“ ‘Dept. of Speculation’ is all the more powerful because, with its scattered insights and apparently piecemeal form, it at first appears slight,” New Yorker critic James Wood wrote. “Its depth and intensity make a stealthy purchase on the reader.”
When named one of the “Ten Best Books” of 2014 by the New York Times, the paper’s critics said of the novel, “Part elegy and part primal scream, it’s a profound and unexpectedly buoyant performance.”
It works as simply as this. Chapter 22 is headed with the innocuous question “How Are You?” Then, like something from The Shining, the answer fills the page with these repeated words:
Motherhood, marriage, and making art are scary.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
The choices for further reading come from a short list. You can begin with Offill’s first novel, Last Things. It is about an eight-year-old homeschooled child whose mother is an ornithologist and father is a scientist. It poses big questions about life, growing up, and the world around us.
So does her most recent novel, Weather. Set around the time of the 2016 presidential election, it is written in a style like that of Dept. of Speculation and has received wide praise.
“In both novels, Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun,” wrote Leslie Jamison in a New York Times review. “In ‘Dept. of Speculation,’ that white-hot core was the heartbreak of domestic collapse. In ‘Weather,’ the collapse exists on a scale at once broader and more abstract: the end of the world itself.”