Jenny Offill
This is a short novel about a marriage. It’s told in 46 brief chapters comprising short paragraphs, almost terse lines and quotes in 160 close-packed pages. The narrator, an unnamed woman living in Brooklyn meets a man who makes soundscapes and falls in love and they get married and have a baby. The wife goes from being a young woman who aspires to be an Art Monster, a person who lives simply for creating their art, to a wife and a mother. Nabakov, she points out, didn’t even fold his umbrella. The details the wife collects and notes begin to tell a narrative, reflecting the narrator’s psychology, the state of her marriage, and possibly its end – there is an infringement in the relationship. The husband gets involved with another woman and the narrator spends a lot of time in this weird phase of trying to figure out the status of her family.
“Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business.”
When her husband is cheating, the narrator starts referring to herself as “the wife” instead of narrating it in the first person which I believe is a way for her to cope. Thin slices of their marriage viewed through these vignettes and the agitated narrator’s emotions swirling in the paragraphs have come together like a symphony in understanding the characters and their emotional turmoil. There is some cutting humour too. There is all this negative space where we don’t know what is happening and it’s so beautiful. This is a captivating portrait of the intimate inner life of a woman steering marriage and motherhood.
To quote Keats, “No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.”
I found much of the writing, style-wise, brilliant and the individual lines and paragraphs to be thought-provoking, sometimes in that fleeting kind of, ‘you are saying something exactly that I’ve thought about before’ kind of way, sort of in a less dim way. Some of them felt a bit too philosophical, pie-in-the-sky for me. But the novel is written in these super short paragraphs, scraps of barely vignettes, that reveal just enough of what is happening. The writing is concise and the words hold a lot of emotional weight and honesty.
HARIKA RAO 