Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill
“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.”
Jenny Offill is an American writer and editor, and although Dept. of Speculation was published in 2014 (and was named as one of “The 10 Best Books of 2014” by the New York Times) I hadn’t heard of either Offill or the book until earlier this year, when the release of her third book Weather bought her into the spotlight once more. I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this slim novella, only that I’d seen plenty of friends and critics raving about her work. My apprehension was perhaps due to having been disappointed in the past by similarly celebrated books, but I decided to dip my toe in and I’m pretty glad I did.
Dept. of Speculation details the highs and lows of a marriage across 46 short, sharp chapters. The story is told in chronological order, from the early flush of first love and marriage through to the bitter uncovering of the husband’s affair. It’s a story that’s been told countless times, and yet Offill manages to find a way to tell it that captures the reader from the first sentence. The story is staggered in neat vignette-like paragraphs, cleanly jumping across the years to chart the experience of domestic life, including the arrival of the couple’s first child. Neither wife nor husband is referred to by name, only by their respective roles within the marriage itself.
Offill dispenses with all the conventional trappings of a novel, paring back on excessive explanations and leaving the reader with the bare bones of the wife’s experiences. Explorations of motherhood and the accompanying loss of identity are examined deftly and poetically:
“The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on.”
I am not a mother but the ways Offill describes the wife’s feelings around motherhood and the depth of love for her daughter found their way straight to my own heart. There was more intensity in the brevity of her descriptions than in any detailed account of motherhood I’ve read yet.
The handling of the wife’s internal turmoil on discovering the husband’s affair is again handled with deep care, while still carrying a raw intensity that hit me deep in my gut. She finds a playlist of songs her husband has created for his lover, and it is the brutality of sitting with the knowledge of this secret before she confronts her husband that sings loudest. A playlist can seem like nothing, but in Offill’s hands, the intimacy of a carefully put-together playlist feels like more of a betrayal than even the most graphic of sexts.
The wife processes this information while sitting on the toilet, her stomach “twisting.” Her first instinct is to observe the mundanity of her surroundings: “the tangle of hair on the side of the sink” and her own “dinged nearly grey underwear.” She rests the blame for her husband’s misdemeanour squarely on her own shoulders as she wonders, “Who would wear such a thing? What kind of repulsive creature?”
The wife spends the rest of the book in a sickly form of limbo as she attempts to figure out the future status of her family. The husband doesn’t make life easy and keeps her guessing as to whether he is in or out. A powerful scene is when she shows up at her husband’s work after the affair is in the open, and he hasn’t yet decided what he is doing. Realising his lover is nearby, the wife demands to see her, throwing a tantrum in the street until both parties oblige. She hides in a doorway so she can watch the lover approach without being seen first. It is another intensely raw and emotionally charged piece of writing. Having experienced an affair in a previous relationship, I immediately identified with that complicated, stomach-churning battle between wanting to see (and compare yourself with) your opponent and wanting to have nothing more to do with the whole situation.
Stylistically, I found Dept. of Speculation brilliant. The white space on the page represents the gap between what is said and unsaid in a marriage, the intimacy, and the uncertainty. This is an old story told in a beautiful and human way.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
