Dept. of Speculation - Jenny Offill (2014)

In titling this post, I instinctively wrote "2018" as the year of publication. Once again, The New York Times Book Review podcast alerted me to this author, in a discussion of Weather, her newest volume. They had occasion to reference Dept. of Speculation, her previous book, and praised it effusively. I put a hold on it at the library. It took a while to get it, because of the waiting list, and then a 60+ day closure. Then it took me too long to read it (it could be read in a day, or two; it took me a week, or two, or three, or four). 

But this book came out six years ago, in the comparatively innocent days of 2014. And I slept way, way too long on Jenny Offill. Unquestionably, this goes on the Best Books list. The first thing I did after finishing Dept. of Speculation was to place a hold on Weather.

Offill, it must be well-known, writes in a very unique, totally original style. It is prose, but it reads like poetry, and sometimes comedy. Also tragedy. The paragraphs are short, sometimes just a sentence or two. The pages are small. There is a limited third-person narrator. 

The plot concerns a young couple--a wife in her mid-30's, a husband a few years older--that has just had a baby in Brooklyn. The novel covers roughly the first six years of the baby's life. It is hardly at all about the baby, later the little girl, except how she annoys them and how they love her:

"Is she a good baby? People would ask me.

Well, no, I'd say." (30)

Certain details emerge. The Husband plays the piano and writes musical scores for film and television. The Wife is a college professor, not writing a follow-up novel; instead she attempts to ghostwrite a memoir by a man who was almost an astronaut, who wants to tell the story of Voyager 2. At a certain point, their apartment is infested with bedbugs. And then the Husband has an affair. And the Wife goes mad, and struggles to find meaning in her life.

There are no easy, simple, neat answers in this book. Only questions. There is no sense that everything is going to be okay in the end. While there is great darkness and cynicism in this work, there are also moments of inspiration that border on the divine (generally, quotes without context from Rilke, or Kafka, and others):

"What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone." (148)

"What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes." (156)

"Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.

Darwin theorized that there was something left over after sexual attractiveness had served its purpose and compelled us to mate. This he called 'beauty' and thought it might be what drives the human animal to make art." (103) 

There is hardly a wasted word in this book. There must already be many Jenny Offill imitators filling up the slush piles. Please read it if you haven't.

Grade: A

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone - Lori Gottlieb (2019)

This morning (8/8/20, from approximately 10:30 AM to 11:45 AM) a truck was parked outside my living room window. The truck had been outfitted with an extremely sensitive alarm due to past break-ins. The driver told me as much when I confronted him. He was parked in a tow-zone. Every time a car rushed past closely enough to his, a little beep would ensue, followed by a succession of quick horn bursts. This aggravated me to no end, as I had a headache, and did not get quality sleep last night. The truck driver (owner of a plumbing company) explained he was not going to change his alarm. I asked him if he could move it, not very politely. I thought I heard him say no, and I cursed at him, not exactly under my breath.  Then I saw him pull away. I was just a jerk. I've been wracked with guilt for more than an hour after the incident.

For context, I was trying to read the last 10 pages of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, the latest selection from the Voracious Violets book club (I have fallen off, badly. Maybe I will resume after Just Mercy, the current selection). To review, previous selections include Educated, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Line Becomes a River.  Certainly, this is my least favorite thus far.  

I open up with this anecdote for two reasons: (1) my aggravation at the car alarm was certainly related to my aggravation at this book never ending; (2) this type of behavior is problematic and indicative of need for change. No one deserves to be talked at like that. And maybe because of this book, and my own disgust at myself for being "that guy," a person that the plumber will look back on with disdain, maybe I am going to try to be better, and more compassionate. 

This book is too long. That is my primary gripe. It's over 400 pages. It's a bit self-indulgent. There is great vulnerability in it, and while that is always beautiful to regard in actual life, in memoir it can feel cloying and overly precious. To be clear, this book has its moments. Several passages did, in fact, make me cry. I just think it could have been about one hundred pages shorter. At a certain point, the author describes how she gets contracts to write two different books--one about Parenting, and the other about Happiness. Apparently she was given huge advances for these. She writes neither. (Note: this review will have mild spoilers.) Instead she wrote this book about Therapy. And it really feels like that--a book she was commissioned to write, that has to hit a certain quota. 

I don't doubt many people love this book, but I did not have the patience for it. I struggled to read it for more than thirty minutes at a time. It is very hard for me to reject books outright. Previously I was forced to do so, since the Chicago Public Library had a three-week limit, and fines. Now there are no fines. I do not want to be a jerk and keep books unnecessarily long. I have three other books to read, all of which are overdue.  I digress. Must avoid self-indulgence in review.

PLOT: Lori is a therapist that suffers an upheaval in her life. Boyfriend leaves her. She is a single mother, and Boyfriend tells her that he can't live with a kid under his roof for 10 more years (he has a kid of his own that is going off to college, and he wants the freedom of an empty nest). He does this completely out of the blue and leaves shortly thereafter. She is completely devastated. She needs to start going to therapy, and she gets connected with Wendell. 

Now my first complaint with the book are the scenes with Wendell. They just bored me to tears. This would probably be a great book for therapists because there is so much inside baseball (and yes, speaking as a patient, some of it was illuminating, and helped me to better understand what my psychiatrist was trying to do with me). But let's be clear: Lori is a clinical psychologist, not a psychiatrist. Perhaps a psychiatrist would write an even more boring book, discussing drug interactions. There is bravery and courage in this book. Gottlieb (not Robert's daughter) certainly opens up some veins and bleeds. Yet she writes so much about appreciating life and enjoying every minute and being thankful for all of its gifts that I can't help but be annoyed, because everything seems easier for her, somehow.

This is decidedly not the case in the chapter "The Whole Package," where she details her desire to be a mother, while not yet having found the right partner, as she hovers around age 36 and 37. As a single, childless 37-year-old, this book made me even more depressed than I already am, at times. She does opt for artificial insemination, and the discussions of the guys whose sperm she wants made me want to puke because they reminded me of how recessive I am. Must not be self-indulgent. There is one clever aside, that perhaps explains why I feel about this book the way I do:

"Other donors seemed to have good health, intelligence, and similar physical features, but something else would raise a red flag, like the donor who wrote that his favorite color was black, his favorite book Lolita, and his favorite movie A Clockwork Orange. I tried to imagine my child reading this profile one day and looking at me like, 'And you chose this one?' I had the same reaction if the donor couldn't spell or use punctuation correctly." (101)

Now I can certainly get behind the last sentence. But dissing fans of Kubrick and Nabokov, two of their mediums' indisputable masters? That is not going to sit well on Flying Houses. Were I that child, were I so lucky to have a mother so open-minded as to embrace transgressive genius, I would love her all the more. Who is to say that child will grow up to be a difficult freak, an enfant terrible? Such blanket characterizations are ultimately harmful to art and humanity. Perhaps this is just a small joke that I am taking far too seriously. But yes, she is enamored to get the sperm of "young George Clooney" (as is everyone else in that clinic).

Clooney, however, does have a memorable cameo in this book:

"Late that fall, I was out to dinner with a group of people after my baby shower when my mother noticed the real George Clooney sitting at a table nearby. Everyone at our table knew about Kathleen's 'young George Clooney' description, and one by one, my friends and family pointed at my enormous belly, then turned their heads toward the movie star. 
He looked much more grown up than he had as a young actor starring in ER. I, too, felt much more grown up than I'd been as a young executive working at NBC. So much had happened in both of our lives. He was about to win an Oscar. I was about to have my son." (107-108)

Yes though, perhaps I am jealous of her trajectory: working at NBC on ER in Los Angeles, deciding she wants to go to med school, then deciding she would rather get a PhD in clinical psychology. She made tons of mistakes and backtracks, and her story feels empowering and reassuring. Yet it still seems too easy for those less accomplished readers among us.

FURTHER PLOT: the narrative technique employed in the novel is to focus on several of her patients: John (a successful TV-show producer and writer); Julie (terminally-ill 35-year-old, recently married, on the verge of starting a family); Rita (a depressed 69-year-old planning to kill herself on her 70th birthday), and Charlotte (a mid-20's low-grade alcoholic in search of a meaningful relationship). Several other ancillary characters appear as supporting players in these patients' lives: Margo, Gabe, Gracie, Ruby, Rosie (John's family); Myron (Rita's romantic interest); Dude (Charlotte's romantic interest that she meets in the waiting room, a patient of her colleague's, a f***boy). 

Some of these narratives are insufferable, some of them have revelatory moments. One of the biggest questions I have about this book: what show was John working on? It seems like a big hit, yet I have zero idea what it could be--it's definitely not Friends, but it seems adjacent to that.

Ultimately, Rita's story is powerful and beautiful, a true highlight of the book. I can recall exactly the passage that struck a chord:

"Here's what Myron realized: He missed Rita. Deeply. He wanted to tell her things--all the time, every day--the way he had wanted to tell his wife Myrna things throughout their marriage. Rita made him laugh and think, and when photos of his grandchildren popped up on his phone, he wanted to show them to Rita. He didn't want to do any of this with Randie in the same way. He loved Rita's sharp intellect and sharper wit, her creativity, her kindness. How she picked up his favorite cheese if she was at the grocery store. 
He liked Rita's worldliness and wry observations and wise counsel whenever he asked her advice. He adored her throaty laugh and her eyes that were green in the sunlight and brown indoors and her bright red hair and her values. He loved that if they started a conversation on one topic, it would segue into two or three others before it would loop back around or that sometimes they'd get so immersed in their tangents that they'd forget what they were talking about in the first place. Her paintings and sculptures made his heart thrill. He was curious about her, wanted to know more about her kids, her family, her life, her. He wanted her to feel comfortable telling him and wondered why she had been like a cipher, revealing so little of her past. 
Oh, and he thought she was beautiful. Absolutely stunning. But would she please stop wearing T-shirts that looked like rags?" (229-230)

Julie's story is also quite moving, and John's story is shattering, and there is certainly much I can relate to in Charlotte's (except it also annoys me because she's 10+ years younger and lamenting, "I just don't want to wake up five years from now and never have had any kind of relationship...five years from now, a lot of people my age won't be single anymore, and I'll be the girl who hooks up with a guy in the waiting room or her neighbor and then tells the story at a party like it's just another adventure.  Like I don't even care." (333-334)). But Rita's story for me is the true heart and soul of this book. 

So this is a complicated book to process, and I think my feelings of annoyance or aggravation largely stemmed from impatience, the pandemic (how can it not color everything we digest, seeing the world we lived in before?), and the unresolved issues I continue to have after six years of therapy. I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it, but I certainly recommend it for anyone that is struggling with grief or trauma, particularly as it relates to parenting or the looming spectre of death. As long as it took me, I got through it faster than A Gentleman in Moscow (which to be fair is very long). There is so much in it that I can't properly address in this review. Actually I wrote this review in less than two hours. So I'm sorry if it's not my finest work. It's a messy review for a messy book. There is great humanity in the work, and many wonderful "academic" portions. I learned something about myself in the process of reading it, and certainly in finishing it this morning and writing this review. I do believe that it will help many people to have a better understanding of therapy and the changes it can inspire in the way we process the world. Patience and compassion are virtues, too. 

Grade: B