Dept. of Speculation

Author Jenny Offill's second novel is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, and knowledge. Offill's heroine referred to in the book as simply the wife, once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. In this book, as they confront an array of common catastrophes—a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on how maternal love consumes everything in its path as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.