Dept. of Speculation
This is a magnetic novel about a marriage of giddy bliss and stratospheric anxiety, bedrock alliance and wrenching tectonic shifts. Offill, author of the novel Last Things (1999) and various children’s books, covers this shifting terrain and its stormy weather in an exquisitely fine-tuned, journal-like account narrated by “the wife,” an ironic self-designation rooted in her growing fears about her marital state.  She is smart if a bit drifty, imaginative and selectively observant, and so precisely articulate that her perfect, simple sentences vibrate like violin strings. And she is mordantly funny, a wry taxonomist of emotions and relationships. Her dispatches from the fog of new motherhood are hilarious and subversive. Her cynical pursuit of self-improvement is painfully accurate. Her Richter-scale analysis of the aftershocks of infidelity is gripping. Nothing depicted in this portrait of a family in quiet disarray is unfamiliar in life or in literature, and that is the artistic magic of Offill’s stunning performance. She has sliced life thin enough for a microscope slide and magnified it until it fills the mind’s eye and the heart. --Donna Seaman