Dept. of Speculation

Jennifer Offil
2014
Rating: 7

My brain is shattered by the election, my attention span is greatly diminished. Partly for this reason, I grabbed Dept. of Speculation to read on a trip to LA. It’s 177 pages, and there’s a good amount of white space on the pages.

It was in fact a fast and breezy read, finished it in 2 sittings. Fortunately, it was also a fun book to read, it was soothing too in these dark times.

It’s not a very visual book, there are not brilliantly observed details (although there are some nice ones), there are no sweeping landscapes, but the protagonist’s voice and worldview made the book worth it.

It’s not particularly transgressive in its themes, story, or formal approach to story-telling, but its sparkling wit more than compensate for any lack of technical or artistic risk-taking.

I don’t really have much in the way of criticism, I just kind of got swept into the tale and enjoyed it; I had no complaints along the way, and wasn’t reading it through an analytical framework.

One observation, and I don’t know how helpful of meaningful it is, is that the story could have been longer and bigger. It’s crazy for me to pick up a book because I wanted a quick read, and to then turn around and say that it was too quick of a read.

Offil intersperses throughout the books a number of quotes from various luminaries; sometimes these spoke more directly to what was happening in the protagonist’s life, other times it seemed to me that they quotes or paraphrasings were somewhat random, but if they were random they didn’t really detract from the story. Sometimes the curating was quite adept and funny.

I walked away from the book feeling like it was an easy one to write, but more likely is that it somehow looked like its effects were easy to achieve but actually were not easy to achieve; that the book masks the skill it took to write.

I think at some point I might come back to it and read it again. It’s an odd compliment to pay to a novel, but there was something soothing about it, maybe due to the fact that it was published in 2014, before our fascist political moment.