I like that Jenny Offill’s novel, Dept. of Speculation (2014), is short and has short paragraphs. Sans a plot, it concerns the marriage and motherhood of an unnamed woman writer, and although I lack interest in what it, or any other contemporary novel, has to say about writers, the mother-and-child stuff is clever and incisive. Even better is what James Wood has observed about the book: “If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state.”
The woman’s husband has an affair and so, yes, there is distress, but a positive ending occurs as well.
“Why doesn’t she throw the bum out?” some people might ask. I don’t know; this is a novel and novels are about how human beings think and behave, and women often don’t throw the bum out, even if they should.
