02-14-14:Jenny Offill Engages 'Dept. of Speculation'
The Domestic Descent
Our world is exploding and it is not surprising that our stories, our sense of stories might as well. Jenny Offill's 'Dept. of Speculation' is an intense, epic series of glimpses at a very simple story, complicated by our very complex world. It's a single-session reading, with the feel of the surreal, but not the unreal.
Offill's vision of a story as the bits of detritus that swim in our consciousness is gripping, powerful and even fun to read. But the wounds it examines, the wounds it leaves in our minds are all too real.
'Dept of Speculation is the story of a relationship, pretty much from the beginning to the end, but Offill's concept of "story" is extremely unusual and engaging. Her experiment is to tell her story in offhand paragraphs, what might in another era have been called "sound-bytes," but in this day and age we'd have to identify as the glimpses afforded to women and men whose lives are shattered by too much information and too many events.
As the novel begins, the wife speaks of "you and I,' and we see love happen, followed by marriage and a child. The baby is difficult, the little girl is charming, but the marriage is not easy. The wife's mind is not up to the task, and as the novel unfolds, the traumas so easily found in an unspectacular life take an unkind, then frightening toll.
Offill is an incredibly skilled and controlled writer, creating a narrative pull and intense tension that will have readers unwilling to stop reading until the book is finished. For all that this is a short book, easily read in one sitting, the story told here, while feeling simple is also quite epic. In the spaces between all those paragraphs, Offill skillfully lets readers experience a tragic, big story.
While the novel is in every sense a realistic and detail-oriented take on marriage, there's a feel of the fantastic here, imparted because Offill creates her spaces with such a precise architecture. 'Dept. of Speculation' (the return address the husband and wife put on their love letters) is a searing, almost scarring novel to read. The descent of a domestic life into dizzying chaos proves to be infinitely more enjoyable to experience in prose for the readers than it is for the all-too-real-feeling characters.
02-10-14:Kelly Corrigan's 'Glitter and Glue'
Remembering Forward
Kelly Corrigan, as she reveals herself at the beginning of 'Glitter and Glue,' is a classic American college graduate. She wants adventure. "Things happen when you leave the house," she tells herself, and then leaves on an adventure to Australia. But adventure is not free. She runs out of money pretty quickly and ends up as a nanny, which is where her adventure in fact begins.
'Glitter and Glue' is a beautifully written, taut and intensely readable story about a young woman who discovers both her mother and herself. For much of the book, Corrigan seems to simply be telling stories about her time as a nanny. It wasn't a simple situation. She'd been fired from her first attempt because she'd gently balked when asked to clean the tiles of an indoor pool. Her next gig found her in the middle of a very unusual situation.
The Tanner family consisted of George, a widower, whose wife had died of cancer, their two young children, his wife's son from her first marriage, who was almost as old as Corrigan, and his wife's father. From servitude to grief, divorce and surrogate motherhood was a journey that the young Corrigan made unthinkingly; we see her trying to keep up and fit in as best she can.
But there's another journey interwoven here. Away from her mother for the first time, Corrigan finds herself taking on a mother's role and reflecting that role off of her experience of her own mother. The writing here is a miracle. Corrigan is all show and no tell. She subtly combines and conflates the woman she is now with the girl she is then, while keeping the two characters very separate. It's a fascinating plot and done with the right combination of subtlety and self-realization.
Beyond the internal character movements, 'Glitter and Glue' also gets the external story telling down with an ease so great that readers won't realize just how smart this all is. The moments with the Tanners are funny and sweet and charming, but always cut with the tart distance of the twenty-something Corrigan.
Corrigan is an accomplished memoirist and while 'Glitter and Glue' may key off from her other works, it stands fine on its own. Corrigan provides all the context needed to understand her own journey towards her vision of her mother not just as a mother, but as a person. 'Glitter and Glue' is charming and smart, the good kid on the block who does well, the one we all like — and remember longer than we have any reason to. Corrigan's memoir reads like a fun little book, but has the staying power of a sweet memory.
New to the Agony Column
09-18-15: Commentary : William T. Vollman Amidst 'The Dying Grass' : An Epic Exploration of Simultaneity
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with William T. Vollman : "...a lot of long words that in our language are sentences..."
09-05-15: Commentary : Susan Casey Listens to 'Voices in the Ocean' : Science, Empathy and Self
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Susan Casey : "...the reporting for this book was emotionally difficult at times..."
08-21-15: Agony Column Podcast News Report : Senator Claire McCaskill is 'Plenty Ladylike' : Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism [Incudes Time to Read EP 211: Claire McCaskill, Plenty Ladylike, plus A 2015 Interview with Senator Claire McCaskill]
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Emily Schultz Unleashes 'The Blondes' : A Cure by Color [Incudes Time to Read EP 210: Emily Schultz, The Blondes, plus A 2015 Interview with Emily Schultz]
07-05-15: Commentary : Dr. Michael Gazzaniga Tells Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience Reveals the Life of Science
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Michael Gazzaniga : "We made the first observation and BAM there was the disconnection effect..."
04-21-15: Commentary : Kazuo Ishiguro Unearths 'The Buried Giant' : The Mist of Myth and Memory
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro : ".... by the time I was writing this novel, the lines between what was fantasy and what was real had blurred for me..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Marc Goodman : "...every physical object around us is being transformed, one way or another, into an information technology..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report UPDATE: Time to Read Episode 199: Marc Goodman : Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
