Jenny Offill

An unflinching portrait of marriage by the award-winning author of Last Things features a heroine simply referred to as "the Wife," who transitions from an idealistic woman who once exchanged love letters with her husband and who confronts an array of universal difficulties.

Dept. of Speculation

dana

our daughter hands us her crumpled papers. you stop and wait for me. we watch as she gets smaller. no one young knows the name of anything.

but truth is she has good impulse control. that is why she isn’t dead. also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. she thinks before she acts. or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. a character flaw, not a virtue. 

she will not go to college if that means she must go away from me. when she has a baby, she will come and stay with me for a month and i will help her care for the baby and then she will go away for one day, then she will come back again and stay for a month or year. she does not ever want to live away from me, she explains. “promise?” i say. she curls up in my arms, all elbows and knees. “promise.”

three things no one has ever said about me:

you need to take yourself more seriously.

my husband gets a new job, scoring soundtracks for commercials. the pay is better. it has benefits. how is it, people ask. “not bad,” he says with a shrug. “only vaguely soul-crushing.”

he’s from ohio. that means he never forgets to thank the bus driver or pushes in front at the baggage claim. nor does he keep a list of those who infuriate him on a given day. people mean well. that is what he believes.

the reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. a home has a perimeter. but sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by girl scouts, by jehovah’s witnesses. i never liked to hear the doorbell ring. none of the people i liked ever turned up that way.

if i had to sum up what he did to me, i’d say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. both when he loved me and when he didn’t.

Emma Bose

My first foray into Offill’s world and it won’t be my last. A fragmentary novel that paints love in all its beautiful complexity. Gestalt.

An unflinching portrait of marriage features a heroine simply referred to as "the Wife," who transitions from an idealistic woman who once exchanged love letters with her husband and who confronts an array of universal difficulties.

Sonia Grgas

Stopped on p67. I could not relate to the character narrating: too wishy washy. A reading of some of the reviews has reinforced my decision to quit. Picked it up again. A little better the second time around. I don't understand what the fuss is all about.

Returned to this book because my son was reading it. Did not dislike it as much as when I first started it, but am still wondering what the fuss is all about.Stopped on p67. I could not relate to the character narrating: too wishy washy. A reading of some of the reviews has reinforced my decision to quit.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone. It may be great but I certainly did not understand it. The only reason I powered through is because it was a short book. 

MereCivilian

Will Vunderink

Too wispy to be fully engaging, but a perfectly fine, pleasant reading experience. But "fine, pleasant" is part of the problem; I wanted much more to feel the wife's pain, confusion, loss, etc. 

So, not the phenomenon it's been made out to be. For a similar approach to similar subject matter I'd take Hempel or Moore or Noy Holland any day.

charisa

kinda hard to rate. it was like... at some parts i thought it was extremely clever and thoughtful, and at others i found it remarkably pretentious and kind of cheesy. is it me who needs to make up their mind here??? i can't tell. i do think that offill's experimental stream-of-consciousness style worked surprisingly well in stitching together all the scatterbrained reckonings of the wife and pithy quotes from philosophers/religious thinkers/poets/etc. it's kinda like if you wove a bunch of emotionally candid fortune cookie slips into a novel. ok, that sounds majorly unappealing but i promise it's in a (mostly) good way, especially considering offill's commendable attempt at simplifying the intricacies of a stagnant marriage (which is a pretty formidable task imo).

Midori Kobayashi

very quotable stream of consciousness vibes here

Jeannette Ordas

A short little book that I wanted to savour and think about. A clever novel in a diary-like form, this book about marriage and motherhood, is witty, painful and earnest and one, if I owned a copy, would pass around to friends.

Amy Thibodeau

If Goodreads had half stars, I'd give this 3.5. It was half poem, half novel and included some lovely writing. Offill communicates the abstract and tangible pain of dealing with infidelity in a way that is visceral and powerful. But, but ... there was no real story propelling things forward. I didn't really have a sense of who these people were or why I should care. The nature of the writing, though beautiful, meant that I was constantly aware of technique rather than being pulled into the experience of reading. This left me feeling like this book was a good experiment, but not an entirely successful one.

maggie

this is such an intimate and heartbreaking account of love and reconciliation.... would be nice to experience someone wanting me someday.....

雪 xue

this was such a lovely, hilarious, confessional, perceptive, complicated work of genius. i can’t express how much i adore it. offil is such an amazing writer. every line is perfect. everything. i basically took screenshots of every page. she writes emotion so well and i am sad now. :(

Ivan Zarea

Beautifully devastating or devastatingly beautiful. Offill's fragmentary account of depression and marriage is raw, sincere and powerful. If that's your kind of thing.

> 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.

They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation. They used to be young, brave, and giddy with hopes for their future. They got married, had a child, and skated through all the small calamities of family life. But then, slowly, quietly something changes. As the years rush by, fears creep in and doubts accumulate until finally their life as they know it cracks apart and they find themselves forced to reassess what they have lost, what is left, and what they want now. Written with the dazzling lucidity of poetry, Dept. of Speculation navigates the jagged edges of a modern marriage to tell a story that is darkly funny, surprising and wise.

Fraser Simons

Even when it meanders wildly the prose and strange revelations coupled with wit and wisdom is more than enough to make it a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Lauren Attaway

A brief but interesting look at an imperfect marriage.

Admired by critics, adored by readers, Dept. of Speculation is an annihilating, electrifying account of marriage and motherhood, love and madness.

such an intimate and heartbreaking account of love and reconciliation...... would love to be wanted someday....

Maggie

Michelle Xu

4/5 Stars

It’s been a month or so since I’ve finished this book, so I feel as though I’ve forgotten a lot of the pent up feelings that I had as I finished the book… Either way, I really liked it; I thought the novel was incredibly unique in how it was written. The prose is beautiful yet never a complete story. The book is written in fragments of thoughts, quotes from other authors, fleeting memories and descriptions of what’s happening. There’s barely any dialogue. As the life of “the wife” continues, we go through her life and comprehend what happens due to her mental state of thought, her emotions and what parts of life she focuses on. As the reader, we infer a lot of what’s happening. The reading experience was easy and fast, but you almost didn’t want to read it too fast, because you’d miss the meaning and context behind each phrase that’s written. Everything seemed to connect somehow, but sometimes her thoughts were so random that it was hard to understand the relevancy until later on. Sometimes those thoughts were hard to follow and there were a few moments where I was confused and had to guess what was happening in her life, but in the end everything became extremely cohesive.

Now for pros:

The quotes. There were so many beautiful lines within this novel such that in the end I had highlighted pages and pages and pages. Out of all my books read this year, this has been the shortest book… and yet I’ve had the most highlighted passages that I liked from it. They’re not always beautiful quotes, but sometimes just really realistic thoughts that I could resonate with. 

An example: 

“But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.”

Also one more line I just really liked because it made me laugh:

“Hahahahahahayoustupidcunthahahahahaha”

Again, I can’t stress enough how unique the reading experience was for me and that definitely added to the book. It wasn’t just another melodramatic, realistic contemporary fiction novel that went through the highs and lows of a relationship. It added so much more to that trope.

However, there were definitely a few parts that bothered me about this book—enough for me to dock it down a star. 

I guess it has to do more with character development. The whole first half of the book, the wife didn’t really have any outstanding qualities about herself. In fact, I didn’t really like reading her thoughts because she was so ridiculously negative. I didn’t find her funny and I found her to be complaining, negative, and really just a drag on everything. I especially felt that way because she really had no reason to. She had a home, a boyfriend, a job, etc. Maybe the purpose of the set up in the first half was to make the reader see how great of a guy the boyfriend/husband was. He seemed perfect in every way, always supportive of her, making jokes, just loving the wife even when she was going through her negative periods. Of course, reading the first half, I just didn’t like it because the WHOLE book is through the eyes and thoughts of the wife. I had to feel the same negativity the wife did.

The turning point for me was (view spoiler)[ when the reader finds out that he cheated on her. (Though this took me a while to figure out and I had to go back to read parts of it to really get it). I just couldn’t believe it. The husband seemed perfect and now he goes and cheats on her?! I guess infidelity was always personal to me since it was what impacted my childhood the most. It’s probably one of the worst things someone can ever do and this Mr. Perfect CHEATED on her?! Suddenly my disdain for the wife switched automatically to pity and understanding. I was just as angry and distraught over the husband as the wife was. I think if at that if the couple worked on their marriage right after that point, I could have found it within myself to forgive him. HOWEVER, it drags on. His character still spends more time with the other woman. He still sees her, acts tender towards her, and takes walks with her! (Where the hahahahahayoustupidcunthahahaha line came from). If my feelings towards the characters were put in graph form, they would be two intersecting lines, with one increasing and the other decreasing as the novel went on. This isn’t exactly by biggest complaint about the book since I feel that both character developments were necessary to get the reader, like me, to relate and follow through.  (hide spoiler)]

I guess what really got me to put the book down one star was the ending. It technically ended on a positive and hopeful note, which I really like… But it really just ended all too fast. I definitely think the book could’ve been longer than what it really was. (view spoiler)[ It went from her crying and being alone every night, even going to a motel to sleep, to thinking about moving to the middle of nowhere, to saying no I don’t want to move to the middle of nowhere, it’s bad to just take your husband away from the mistress without working on your marriage first, to saying fuck it, let’s move to the middle of nowhere, to still being depressed and not really communicative, to like 5 months passed, to yay we’re looking at the snow that represents a new beginning for us!  (hide spoiler)] So yes, I definitely think the author had so much more opportunity to really show us the couple work on their marriage, not just take him away from the problem.

Dept of Speculation

Jade Flynn

Aphoristic, calming and beautifully crafted. A story that many should read but for some reason have not.

Witch

This novel may be a quick read, but it packs a punch. It's a poetic look into a marriage. It is romantic, it is beautiful, but it also breaks your heart and bring you to tears.

Daryl Houston

I didn't love this at first. It seemed a little off-hand, maybe a little cute, at times like something you'd read in a clever blog post, which is great for a blog post but not necessarily great for a book rumored to be one of the better reads of 2014. At about the halfway point, as things began to unravel, I liked it more. The book became not a series of rambly inconsequential musings but a document of suffering and coping, which I had an easier time taking seriously and figuring was worth my time.

Often enough, Offill says true things in ways that couldn't be said in a truer way. I don't know how much they'd resonate with the childless or the unmarried, though.

I'm glad I read it and really wish I could give out 3.5 stars, or maybe 3.7. It's not quite a 4 for me, but it's certainly more than a 3. I like a little more heft -- a word count maybe an order of magnitude greater -- in a book that plumbs the sort of stuff this book ultimately plumbs.

Dept. of Speculation

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