It’s very rare that I open a book and I know from the very first sentence that I’m going to love it. The Dept of Speculation was one such book.
Be warned that my notes below contain some spoilers. I generally try to avoid these, but in this case, I thought the plot was less interesting than the form, so I don’t feel I’m doing other readers a disservice by spoiling certain details.
The story of a marriage
This is the story of a marriage as told by the “wife” (unnamed). The story itself feels very familiar. Woman has ambitions, but then falls in love, gets married, has a baby, and those ambitions are set aside for more practical things, like raising a child and having a joyless job that pays well enough. We probably all know where this is going – the husband ends up cheating with a younger woman. It’s such a cliche at this point, it’s almost mundane, banal. Who amongst us, women, hasn’t heard this story before, from our friends, mothers, sisters, colleagues, if we haven’t lived it ourselves?
However, the beauty of the book is in the way the story unfolds. This is not a typical novel structure. The story is told through vignettes, these little fragments of thoughts and events, that can feel rather disjointed and random at first glance, but collectively they weave this narrative that pulls you in and holds surprising depth.
A new term – art monster
The book coins the term “art monster” which I really love, and it defines it as this archetype of a person with the singular focus on creating art, in a selfish and almost obsessive way. And of course, historically, men were the ones who were afforded the luxury of pursuing their genius without concerning themselves with raising children or managing the household. Offill references this and says “Nabokov never opened his own umbrella. Vera licked all his stamps”
So we follow this unnamed woman, who wanted to be an art monster – a writer – but then got married instead and had a baby girl and had to focus on her family. There is obviously some regret there, but for the most part, the wife seems content with her choices. She loves her child and her husband. She talks about other women who are unhappy in their marriages, about the mummy gossip on the playground and how other women complain about their husbands, and she feels lucky that her husband is seemingly better than these other men.
Stylistic choices
Once the husband’s affair is revealed, the narration moves from first person to third person, but we still follow the wife and her perspective, so the change in narrators is obviously used to show her detachment from the husband, and this gap that opened between them.
When it comes to the affair, there is no dramatic confrontation or confession. There’s very little dialogue, even. It is all revealed through small moments and gestures, almost intuitively – you know what is happening or what’s about to happen, without explicitly being told. Offill describes the way the air changes when they skirt around the subject, or the look in his eyes before he nods in answer to her question.
Commentary on womanhood and motherhood
There was a scene that really jumped at me, when the wife tells a friend about the affair. Her friend can’t believe it and says “but he’s the kindest person I know”, so the wife wonders if it was her fault. She reckons that if he is so kind and so good, maybe she ruined him enough to get him to do something so cruel. It’s just another subtle commentary on womanhood and some of the emotional burdens we take on ourselves. I particularly love the quote here – “So it begs the question, doesn’t it? Did she unkind, and ungood, and untrue him?”
Motherhood is depicted realistically and it’s rather endearing. The woman’s love for her baby is obvious even in those moments where motherhood is frustrating and thankless and painful. She talks about her baby screaming constantly and only calming down when she walks her outside, at speed (“If I slowed down or stopped, she would start wailing again”). There is the boring aspect of motherhood, too (“What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing”) and that endearing part of motherhood where you can’t get enough of your baby (“That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it”)
Why did I love this?
What I liked most about the book is that it felt like a lot of the story was happening in what wasn’t being said, almost like negative space – which can feel a bit gimmicky, but I thought it was well done here. So Offill will describe the atmosphere in a room, people’s gestures, and their expressions, and they all point to one thing, which is never named, and the absence of it highlights that thing even more.
I thought it was a unique read and it flows really smoothly, even with this disjointed structure. It can easily be read in one or two sittings, but although it’s so compact, there’s quite a bit to take away from it.
Let me know if you’ve read it and what you thought about it, especially the ending, because I disagreed with most opinions I read about it. And if you haven’t, I hope I’ve convinced you to do it, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
A Matter of Imagination 