Dept. of Speculation (Compact Disc)

Staff Reviews

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".

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.