There's a character in Jenny Offill's acclaimed first novel,
Last Days, that I've thought about again
and again as I've tried to write this introduction.
His name is Edgar and he is a neighborhood boy
incredibly impressed and smitten by the mother of the narrator
of the novel, A woman named Anna, who is brilliant,
and hilarious, and intense, and who
spends much of the book instructing
her daughter on topics like endangered animals, creation
myths, and the beginnings of the universe.
So to impress this woman, Edgar decides
that he will become a futurist.
He will try some black and pass around pamphlets with lines
like, "Let's break away from rationality, as out
of a horrible husk, and throw ourselves like pride
spiced fruit into the immense distorted mouth of the wind."
When the narrator brings one of these pamphlets to Anna,
she briefly looks it over before tossing it aside and saying,
"Those aren't even his own words.
Edgar comes from a long line of decadent and over bred people."
And I sympathize with Edgar completely here,
because how could I possibly bring my own words
in front of Jenny Offill even to talk about her writing?
At times, this introduction has just
been a long list of all my favorite quotes from Dept.
of Speculation, her latest novel, which
was named one of the 10 Best Books of the year
by The New York Times, and shortlisted
for the PEN/Faulkner, the Folio Award, the DUBLIN Literary
Award.
In addition to her novels, she has also
been the author of four children's books,
and co-editor of two essay anthologies
with Elissa Schappell.
And she is also an author that does everything right,
and can do it in the space that another writer might
use to describe a cabinet.
Her novels are concerned the subjects
of growing up and getting older, of the frustration of ambition,
the difficulties and betrayals and deep joys of parenthood
and marriage.
In short, all the aspects of our lives
which are daily the most present and intense preoccupations we
have, and Offill is able to render these experiences
with the immediacy and the absurdity with which we receive
them.
A chapter of Dept. of Speculation
can begin with the panic of the narrator's child
breaking her wrists, move to the guilt of getting her to the ER,
through the relief and humor when
the child is put on morphine, and begins to describe how she
will get a dozen donuts as a reward for this,
and take one bite out of each of them.
And it will end that night in an idyll
of domesticity and comfort from which I'll quote at length.
"We all pile into the big bed.
There is a musty animal smell to her casts now.
She brings in the nightlight that makes fake stars
and places it on the bedside table.
Soon, everyone is asleep but me.
I lie in our bed and listen to the hum of the air
conditioning, and the soft sound of their breathing.
Amazing.
Out of the dark waters, this."
And all of this in four pages of paragraph-long fragments, which
also makes room for meditations on Christian Science
and quotes from Wittgenstein.
Offill's intense, curious prose, and her ambitious, and funny,
and fully-human characters range widely
through the realms of philosophy, history,
and science in order to make sense of their own lives.
From the brashness of futurism, to the loneliness
of polar and space exploration, to the fundamental shifting
realities of molecular biology, as when the narrator of Dept.
of Speculation is processing a deep betrayal and thinks,
"Once ether was everywhere, the crook of an arm,
say, also the heavens.
It slowed the movement of the stars,
told the left hand where a right hand went.
Then it was gone like hysteria, like the hollow Earth.
The news came over the radio, there's only air
now, abandon your experiments."
As I mentioned, I'd rather read her prose on my own.
And through her quick and gorgeous sentences,
her inexhaustible knowledge and curiosity,
and her acute eye for everyday reality,
it feels like everything's been said.
One can read her novels from start to finish on a plane ride
or in an evening and feel by the end of each
as if an entire life has been captured,
and no more words are necessary.
Please welcome Jenny Offill.