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Jenny Offill’s second novel, Department of Speculation, reads more like a diary than a novel. Composed of terse paragraphs and eccentric observations woven together to form a coherent narrative, this novel follows a writer/teacher who falls in love and get married in her twenties. After a painful miscarriage, she has a daughter, and their family becomes a unit. Department of Speculation explores the inner workings of a once strong but soon troubled marital relationship, fractured by the husband’s infidelity, and the indestructible bond between mother and daughter, even during the most challenging of circumstances.
The narrator is a writer turned writing teacher, who cannot seem to get a handle on completing her second novel after the birth of her daughter. She is riddled with anxieties of all different kinds: anxiety in her marital relationship, anxiety about her mothering style and her inability to please her colicky baby, and anxiety about her creative output and career. She second guesses virtually every decision she makes, and cannot seem to let go of some precipitous sense of doom. She claims,
“Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to take yourself more seriously.“
The narrator is constantly bringing up the concept of an “art monster”, which seems to represent some sort of creative genius that only dedicated themselves to the creation of art, eschewing traditional concerns like family, love, and connection. She remarks that her goal “was never to get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. 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.” The narrator’s concern with this idea of an art monster is rooted in her anxiety surrounding her own inability to produce art, as she is not able to complete the second novel that her peers and colleagues expect from her. (It is worth noting that there was a fifteen year gap between Offill’s first novel and this one.) Tied up in the narrator’s anxiety are the ideas of ambition, success, self-worth, and creativity; all of which cause her shame surrounding the prioritization of her family.
This novel is in many ways about the dehumanizing and isolating nature of shame. While the first portion of the novel is told by first person narration, in the second, which follows the revelation of the husband’s affair, the “I” reference to the narrator is replaced by the third person “the wife”. After her husband’s affair, the narrator feels a mix of emotions including anger, jealousy, grief, and regret. But mostly she feels dehumanized, detached. She laments that her husband ever felt so lonely that he sought out the affair, and in one scene feels shame at the sight of her aging, post-childbirth body. She fantasizes about having an affair of her own with an ex-boyfriend, relishing attention from other men, then eventually just ends up isolated once again. Her emotional and physical isolation within her marriage is only broken by the company of her daughter, the only person whom the narrator realizes that she will ever wholeheartedly and irrevocably love.
Offill has crafted a moving but witty portrayal of a mother in crisis, dealing with a broken marriage and the struggle of protecting her child from the broken world. This novel is about what it means to be a fierce mother, one who is always fighting for the best possible life for her child, shielding her even from the ugliness within her own family. Department of Speculation is a deeply intimate and uniquely crafted look inside the mind of a woman battling her own demons and shame, and building a shelter for herself in her own mind. A brilliant novel written by an author with the luminous wit characteristic of only the most seasoned art monster.
Further Reading: Offill’s most recent novel, Weather, strikes a similar chord as this one. (Read my review here).