Because they come to the woman's mind unbidden, they are often stripped of context, making the reader work to find out what is happening. Jenny Offill can keep it up: almost every one of these vignettes is interesting and perfectly put. There is a risk in charming the reader early on like this – unless you can keep it up. On the way to the diner, he apologised for never really loving me. "He seemed to have come all the way from San Francisco just to have coffee. She describes how an ex-boyfriend appears on her doorstep. They are like your cleverest friend's Facebook updates. Little people, Edison called them." Her thoughts and recollections have an aphoristic neatness to them, enhanced by the way each paragraph is set alone on the page, white space above and below. "Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. "Memories are microscopic," the woman says. The story is told in fragments, like memories that float in when you're trying to think about other things. There aren't many characters, and no one is named: there is the husband, their daughter and a few acquaintances. From the point of view of an unnamed American woman, it gives us the hurrahs and boos of daily life, of marriage and of parenthood, with exceptional originality, intensity and sweetness. Dept. of Speculation is a riposte to the notion that domestic fiction is humdrum and unambitious.
Fifteen years later, this is her second, and it was worth the wait. But contradictions are what you might expect from an author whose first novel was called Last Things. A book this sad shouldn't be so much fun to read.
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