Jenny Offill’s slender second novel, Dept. of Speculation, is a portrait of a marriage from the honeymoon days of first romance through to the bitter aftermath of the husband’s affair. It’s a timeless, even, some might say, predictable story, but Offill’s innovative fragmentary structure breathes a fresh and visceral vibrancy into this age-old saga.
The story is told chronologically but piecemeal in a series of short – single paragraph in length – vignettes. Yet despite these very clear separations within the text, the sense of cohesive narrative is extremely strong, and the reader is perched at the very heart of the action, from the centre of the wife’s being, from whose perspective the narrative unfolds.
What Offill lays most bare is the stripping of selfhood that marriage and motherhood entail, and the suffering this inflicts on a woman who wanted to be an “art monster”. “Women almost never become art monsters,” we’re informed, “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, of course, gets in the way, and instead of writing her second book, the protagonist (she and her husband remain nameless throughout, only ever referred to by the roles they inhabit in their marriage) finds herself pacing the aisles of Rite Aid – the only place her baby will stop crying – and obsessing over emergency precautions for the many disasters that could befall her daughter.
Offill is completely brilliant on the raw impotence of a mother’s love – an emotion so strong, “it seemed doomed, hopelessly unrequited” – not to mention the mundane brutality of marital betrayal – a playlist of songs from her husband to his lover that leaves the wife sat on the loo with her stomach “twisting”, clocking the mildew on the shower curtain, the disgusting “tangle of hair on the side of the sink”, even her own “dinged nearly gray” underwear: “Who would wear such a thing? What kind of repulsive creature?” she wonders desperately. Beautifully devastating, Dept. of Speculation is a worthy inclusion on this year’s Folio prize shortlist.
Dept. of Speculation is published by Granta, £7.99. Click here to order a copy for £6.39
