DEPT. OF SPECULATION: JENNY OFFILL

This is one of the five New York Times selections for outstanding fiction in 2014.  I couldn't agree less! I finished it only because it was so highly recommended, but I never really enjoyed it.  Maybe that says something about me, what I am not sure.

We never learn the narrator's name but know she's written a novel, is working on her second and is mostly 'unhappy.'  We see life through her eyes, in often disparate fragments, like thoughts that often move through our mind, often disconnected.  Generally, this is the story about a marriage, the deliciousness of falling in love, the marriage and what comes afterwards, a child, with it the great responsibility, and the marriage with all its transformations and realizations, about the institution, none of which most are prepared for---we learn to live with it.

She does not want things to change but they do.  The daughter comes, changing her life.  Her relationship with her husband inevitably changes and, unfortunately,  they grow apart.  And her unhappiness with her changed life, the responsibility of her daughter, daunting as well as precious, and her unfinished novel contribute, perhaps, to her husband's infidelity. They see a therapist and try to work things out, and the novel ends with their moving to the country, getting a dog, and things seem to have settled down.  She thinks maybe he 'loves me again,' as the novel ends.

The novels fragmentary style, its observations, its stream of consciousness, bothered me but at times it rang true, made me laugh, or think hard about what she said. Some observations are off the wall, others follow a chain of thought.  There's a truth to this novel, how an infant can be loved and disliked by the same person, its mother.  And marriage is never what you expect, the changes unexpected, the compromises hard to make.  Obviously, lots of readers loved this novel.  It just didn't grab me, more fragments and observations than story.  But if you want to learn about the institution of marriage, this just might be a good primer.  A typical fragment, that kind that salt and pepper the novel: “The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.” 

How true for Offill's narrator.