A Brooklyn writer is having trouble producing a second book; she also struggles with bedbugs, a small daughter and a husband who gets involved with a younger woman. The plot of Jenny Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation, doesn’t sound promising: “If someone had described this novel to me, I would never have read it,” she says when we meet on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. A novel of ideas half disguised as a domestic drama, it’s told in fragments, jokes, quotations: WB Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein appear alongside proverbs, scientific “fun facts” and snippets of self-help. So familiar is the story that it can be told with rare economy, leaving out almost every expected element in favour of something quicker, sadder, funnier. As her agent told the press when they sold the novel to Knopf in 2013, “If your average book is a body, this is an x-ray.” When she saw it had made the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2014, Offill wondered if she’d start seeming too popular for readers like herself (she’s often drawn to “more experimental, small-press books”).
Over lunch, Offill still looks a little taken aback. Her debut, Last Things, came out to good reviews in 1999, but she clearly didn’t expect this smaller, stranger book to be such a hit. “I realised about a year ago, ‘Oh, I’m not sure that underdog persona’s going to fly any more.” As well as teaching writing as a “roving adjunct”, she’s had a lot of jobs over the years, from waiting tables to working at BookCourt, my local bookshop in Brooklyn, to facilitating the vanity projects of “crazy rich people”. For years she wondered if she should do a postgraduate course in linguistics, or become a primatologist, but “like many writers I’m kind of a one-trick pony – this is the thing I can do”.
Related: Dept. of Speculation review – intense vignettes of domestic life
“A woman at the playground explains her dilemma. They have finally found a house, a brownstone with four floors and a garden, perfectly maintained, on the loveliest of blocks in the least anxiety producing of school districts, but now she finds that she spends much of her day on one floor looking for something that has actually been left on another floor.”
Related: Tehching Hsieh: the man who didn't go to bed for a year
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