A sparse and fragmentary work built of jokes, quotes, impressions, and confessions, "Dept. of Speculation" is held together by an unnamed female character barely holding it together. She is called “I” in the first first-person half, then “I” flits to “the wife” for the third-person last. The first-person is claustrophobic; “I” can’t see outside of herself. (Her: an upper middle class American urbanite, married with child, and a writer, like Offill, a decade-plus from her first and last published work.) “I” feels trapped, caught between a youthful dream of becoming an “art monster” (“road not taken,” her husband says) and the “swirl of hair on the back” of her new baby’s head. The domestic cliché is driven home when her husband does what husbands with self-defeating wives are wont to do in contemporary upper middle class American marriage narratives. Playful clichés open up space — we disidentify. With the switch to the third-person comes comic relief. In “the wife,” author Offill and we learn to laugh at "ourselves," at the idea of an "I".
— Fiona
In Department of Speculation, an unnamed narrator known simply as “the wife” contends with the inevitable frictions that arise between the domestic sphere and the demands of her art. Attempts to create are thwarted by the mundane; a faltering marriage, a colicky baby, an invasion of bedbugs. How to be both artist and person, Offill reminds us, remains an unanswered question unique to the female experience.
— Mariah
“I found myself gasping at the sheer beauty and conciseness of Offill's sentences in this portrait of a marriage. Dept. of Speculation can be devoured quickly, or readers can linger in it over many sittings. Covering the topics of love, loneliness, grief, joy, fidelity, beauty, depression, mania, motherhood, and writing, the shifting points of view are subtle yet profound, and despite the darkness and sadness of the story, when I closed the book I was left more alert and attentive, and feeling more alive. Highly recommended!”
— Janet Geddis, Avid Bookshop, Athens, GA
Jenny Offill is the author of the novel Last Things, which was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Book Award. She teaches in the writing programs at Queens University, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University.
“Shimmering. . . . Breathtaking. . . . Joyously demanding.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Slender, quietly smashing. . . . A book so radiant, so sparkling with sunlight and sorrow, that it almost makes a person gasp.” —The Boston Globe
“Powerful. . . . Exquisite. . . . A novel that’s wonderfully hard to encapsulate, because it faces in many directions at the same time, and glitters with different emotional colors.” —The New Yorker
“A startling feat of storytelling . . . Each line a dazzling, perfectly chiseled arrowhead aimed at your heart.” —Vanity Fair
“Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I’ve read before. If I tell you that it’s funny, and moving, and true; that it’s as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1897, will you please simply believe me, and read it?” —Michael Cunningham
“You can read Jenny Offill’s new novel in about two hours. It’s short and funny and absorbing, an effortless-seeming downhill ride that picks up astonishing narrative speed as it goes.” —The New York Review of Books
“Gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.” —Sam Lipsyte
“Introspective and resonant. . . . Offill uses her novel to explore the question of how to be an artist as well as a wife and mother, when these states can feel impossibly contradictory.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Absorbing and highly readable. . . . Intriguing, beautifully written, sly, and often profound.” —NPR
“Audacious . . . Hilarious . . . . An account of matrimony and motherhood that breaks free of the all-too-limiting traditional stories of wives and mothers. . . . It may be difficult to truly know what happens between two people, but Offill gets alarmingly close.” —The Atlantic
“Piercingly honest. . . . A series of wry vignettes that deepen movingly.” —Vogue
“Dept. of Speculation is a riposte to the notion that domestic fiction is humdrum and unambitious. . . . A shattered novel that stabs and sparkles at the same time. It is the kind of book that you will be quoting over and over to friends who don’t quite understand, until they give in and read it too. . . . A book this sad shouldn't be so much fun to read. ” —The Guardian (London)
“Whip-smart, defying description, will bring your walls down around you.” —Flavorwire
“[A] mini marvel of a novel. . . . Unfolds in tart, tiny chapters suffused with pithy philosophical musings, scientific tidbits, and poetic sayings that collectively guide a brainy, beleaguered couple through the tricky emotional terrain of their once wondrous, now wobbly union.” —Elle