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NOVEL: Dept. of Speculation
AUTHOR: Jenny Offill
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2014
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This book isn’t a narrative, like most traditional novels. It’s bits and pieces, fragments of writing, some only a sentence long, others several pages. It’s arresting, right away, and starts to coalesce into a story, one that jumps around in time and switches from first person to third person and back to first person.
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The story is about a family: a woman, a man, and a child. The marriage is in crisis. The wife is in crisis, feeling lost, unsure of her role as a woman, a mother, an artist, an adult. She’s prickly and difficult and conflicted and funny and clever and in pain and sympathetic. There’s not enough time, there’s not enough money, there’s no clear direction, there are bedbugs. The husband is in crisis, getting older, looking for something easier, someone easier.
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It’s rather brilliant, and captures a restless and creative mind, angry and hurt, heart still wide open. There’s a philosopher friend, ruminations on prison life at Alcatraz, a Lebanese proverb, a nosy dental hygienist, trips to the emergency room, Darwin, Yeats, Rilke.
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Fiction about domestic life is, all too often, dreary and predictable, or alternately simplistic and sentimental. This book has none of those faults–it’s moving, it’s dazzling, it’s surprising, and it packs an awful lot of wisdom and insight into under 200 pages. You can read it in an afternoon, but it won’t leave you for a very long time.
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RATING (one to five whistles, with five being the best): 3 1/2 Whistles
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HOW TO PURCHASE: Amazon
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Laura LaVelle is an attorney and writer who lives in Connecticut, in a not quite 100-year-old house, along with her husband, two daughters, and a cockatiel.
Laura can be contacted at laura@newswhistle.com
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Lead-In Image Courtesy of studiostoks / Shutterstock.com
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