But in a city where there’s “nowhere to cry,” the whirring mind of Offill’s narrator is used chiefly to try and explain her emotional fracture. When these books are too brainy, they can feel like chores. This is one of those emerging books that makes fiction feel like performance art-the changing pronouns, the conversational quoting of Rilke and Keats and Weil, the discussion of writing via writing. Yes, “the only love that feels like love is the doomed kind,” but a later shard might relight the scene with a quick, incisive pointerlight: “Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.” “Nothing” is the first answer given to the question “You know what’s punk rock about marriage?” The second answer elaborates: “All the puke and shit and piss.”
of Speculation, “the objects around her bristle with intent.” Yet the book is brisk because it doesn’t dwell in the darkness. “When she is alone,” says the narrator, writing about herself in letters she postmarks Dept. There is an equally fine line between conveying exhaustion and madness, one that the character navigates with prescriptions and outbursts and that Offill handles with shifting pronouns and understated honesty.
When hearing the phrase “sleep like a baby” on the subway, the narrator wants to “to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.” A long italicized mashup of nursery rhymes, kid’s activities, and board games ends with the devastating line “ you be the thumble, mama, I’ll be the car.” The book is a relentless quest to unpack every trope and truism about motherhood and immediately junk the gift inside. If the moment is tender, then the shard will be tender-the newborn gives her mother “a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.” But “tender” is little more than a fancy word for near-raw. There is a fine line between sentiment and sentimentality, particularly when writing about parenthood, and by writing in short more-prose-than-poem shards across 46 chapters, Offill always halts before indulging in the latter. “To live in a city is to be forever flinching,” she says, and her flinching-in an apartment with a newborn daughter, a kind but adulterous husband, and a stalled writing project-is quite a performance, a constant wigglesome sort of in-fighting between those five roles. of Speculation is a brisk, biting 160-page novel that functions like a no-bull, “gloves-off” manual-in-notes for being 1) an artist 2) a wife 3) a mother 4) a woman, and 5) a human. The Conventionalist Speculation SpeculationĮnny Offill’s Dept.
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