Dept. of Speculation

This is a lean novel which, on its face, sprints through a decade of marriage with only brief, glancing signs and suspended moments to provide context. What lies within and between are meditations, musings, and persistently remembered adages and quotes and statements of fact that belie some deeper truth.

Offill’s protagonist, ‘the wife’ (sometimes speaking in first person, other times playing with and simulating an omniscient view of herself) meditates on the challenging, lonesome, frustrating episodes and seasons of their marriage, from caring for an infant on her own who only stops crying under the crackling florescence of the nearby CVS, to not fulfilling her dream of being an ‘art monster’, or – more significantly – living through the fall out from her husband’s infidelity. She peppers literature, memoir, poetry, fragments of song lyrics, dialogue in throughout her observations, sometimes playing with the idea of relevance to her own life, other times seeming to submit these extractions as exhibitions inherently meaningful to her particular predicament.

Her language is playful and profound, and even through such a brisk collection of temporal moments you get a sense of her relationship to her husband, daughter, friends. There are many darkly hilarious incidents woven in, for example when her daughter is a few years old:

“Sometimes she plays a game now where she scatters her stuffed animals all over the living room. ‘Babies, babies,’ she mutters darkly as she covers them with white napkins.

‘Civil War Battlefield,’ we call it.”

One of my favorite moments (and there are many) is when she first encounters her husband’s lover. The wife in this moment takes on an archly self-aware authorial voice reflecting on this – as ‘the wife’ is also a writer by profession – critiquing the artificiality of their exchange, the improbability of a handshake, the suspicion that there would truly be an absence of atonement, or their stilted dialogue (“She would not have let one of her students write the scene this way”!).

Definitely best read in a single sitting. Strange little moments from this will definitely stick with me – like what did the people in the 18th century think when all that woolen clothing they wore inevitably gave them a static shock?

Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a moving portrayal of a family (husband, two sons) grieving the sudden loss of their wife and mother. It’s an oblique, magic novel that conveys a much deeper sense of the wild, scattered state of mind that accompanies grief with metaphor, make-believe, and word play. The father, a writer, is coming to terms with his wife’s death while writing a book about his favorite poet, Ted Hughes, to be titled Ted Hughes’ Crow on the Couch: A Wild Analysis.

At this point, Crow, scatty, side-tracked and single-minded caretaker and philosopher, careens into the house and the family’s psyche in “a rich smell of decay, a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather, and yeast”

Despite the suspension the family are in – a foreignness crowded with clumsy, socially awkward interactions with others – the crow gives them space to act out their despair in often scattered, wild proclamations, humorous reflections, and through direct confrontation. He won’t leave until they don’t need him anymore.

“I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand bushes, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her.” – Dad

Eugh, said Crow, you sound like a fridge magnet.

The point of view shifts from the dad (husband), his two boys, and Crow, whose line of thinking is poetic, sometimes primeval, and always disorderly. He also regularly has nightmares, some of my favorite passages. Similar to the way Crow expresses himself, the overall style is a glancing, ragged mix of dialogue, poetry, fable, epigraph, note, observation.

I only really wish this were longer.