Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation
“No one young knows the name of anything.” So concludes The Department of Speculation, the April selection for Anthony Jeselnik’s book club. It’s an intriguing line in a book where, to my recollection, no character has a name. The narrator refers to herself as “the wife,” her husband as “the husband,” and so on. One is led into their own speculation about the connection there, but I’m not going to do so here.
I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not I enjoyed this book. I appreciated it a great deal, enjoying the allusory style, conveying emotions through literary and cultural references, and so on. But there was also a sense that the style was spackling for a flimsy, patchwork story that’s covering very well-worn material (a failing marriage) that wouldn’t necessarily be worth exploring at all in a conventional telling. Of course, in my opinion the heart of a story isn’t the plot, it’s the characters, and this may be my largest complaint about the book.
My initial reaction was the narrative style push the characters away by default, which is in itself a neat way of showing how the narrator perhaps keeps people at a distance, viewing them through various cultural prisms. I thought this explained why the husband barely seems like a presence at all. But there’s another character, the Philosopher, who managed to make more of an impact despite the style, and in one wonderfully short sequence I even had the feeling that the Philosopher was the narrator’s true love interest—or at least, the better match.
I was playing golf yesterday with my best friend, who is also reading the Jeselnik picks. We talked about the book off and on during the round, and he likes it far more than I do. In fact, he considers it one of the best and most realistic portrayals of a failing marriage he’s seen. (He’s been through a couple himself, having had wives commit affairs on him.) I myself have never been through a divorce. Truth be told, in my early 50s, I’ve still never been in a relationship. (I once dated someone for a few months before they told me they wanted me to be “one of many,” and that was the end of that). So when I experience stories about failed or failing partnerships, any critique I make sadly has no basis in lived experience at the present time. Anyway, as my buddy and I talked about the book, and whether or not the characters might divorce or not, he pointed out that Offill’s narrator changes the pronouns to “we” at the end, which wasn’t something I’d noticed but surely either hints at the outcome or suggests a change in the narrator’s emotional stance. I’ll likely go back and reread the last few chapters to try and catch that for myself and see what else I might speculate upon, but otherwise I think I’m unlikely to pick up the novel again.
In just a few short days, I’ll know what Jeselnik is picking for May. Looking forward to it.
