I don’t think I can write about this book without talking about a significant plot-point that isn’t revealed until partway through it. So if you’re spoiler-averse, you might want to stop reading now.<\/p>\n
So, right: I was really really enjoying Dept. of Speculation<\/em>. The beginning of the book is such a delight: interesting form, humor, moments of beautiful prose. The book’s short chapters are made of short paragraphs, quotes, lists: the opening lines, below, are fairly representative of the style and tone:<\/p>\n Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.<\/p>\n It was still months before we’d tell each other all our stories. And even then some seemed too small to bother with. So why do they come back to me now? Now, when I’m so weary of all of it. (3)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I love the way the book tells the protagonist’s story, the way it mixes first-person narration and third-person narration and quotes from\/allusions to Horace and Coleridge and Hesiod and Keats and lots more. I love that the protagonist is ghost-writing a book about space, and that the narrative includes a lot of bits about astronauts and Carl Sagan that turn out to relate, thematically, to the story of the protagonist’s marriage. I love all the bits about the protagonist’s life in the city and the start of her relationship with the man who will be her husband, the energy of it. In this Paris Review interview<\/a>, Jenny Offill says this: “What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.” Yes: there are so many moments of those feelings in this book. I like the way the book explores ideas of change and impermanence: at one point the protagonist talks about how she had a persistent cough that doctors couldn’t figure out, and then after she got married it just went away; at another point she talks about Hipparchus cataloging stars after seeing a new one: what seemed permanent and unchanging isn’t. <\/p>\n But—and here’s the spoilery bit—the protagonist’s husband sleeps with another woman, and suddenly I found myself enjoying the book a bit less. Partly I think this means the book is successful: the narrator becomes a bit unhinged, and her insecurities and fears and worries are so central, and so vividly written, that reading about them is a bit uncomfortable. But at the same time, I didn’t entirely care<\/em>. This is probably partly due to my personal biases\/experiences, but I don’t think it’s just that: the protagonist herself realizes that a partner sleeping with someone else doesn’t have to be the end of the world. There’s this: “Her sister has a deal with her husband. Whatever happens, keep it like in the fifties. Not one word ever. Make sure she’s a nobody.<\/em>” (126). And this: “If only they were French, the wife thinks. This would all feel different. But no, feel<\/em> isn’t the word exactly. What is it that the grad students say? Signify.<\/em> It would all signify<\/em> differently” (120-121). But OK, the protagonist feels how she feels, and her husband’s infidelity is a moment of crisis in their relationship, and even if I wished it were less central to this story, it still works, in its way, and I still enjoyed this book overall. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t think I can write about this book without talking about a significant plot-point that isn’t revealed until partway through it. So if you’re spoiler-averse, you might want to stop reading now. So, right: I was really really enjoying Dept. of Speculation. The beginning of the book is such a delight: interesting form, humor, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}