Dept. of Speculation

Dept. of Speculation is a 2014 novel by American author Jenny Offill. It charts the marriage of an unnamed protagonist—sometimes “I” and sometimes “the wife”—and her husband, from their courtship, marriage, and the arrival of their first child, through the husband’s affair and its uneasy resolution.

The novel opens with an unnamed narrator thinking about relationships. She details some of the men she has met in her life. She recalls that she used to focus on her work instead of her love life, believing that a good and fulfilling career would hold loneliness at bay. She describes how her work as a writer, and her day-job as a fact-checker for a science magazine, did not achieve this goal.

The narrator remembers her friend “The Philosopher” introducing her to “you,” a man who creates “soundscapes.”



Soon the narrator and the soundscape-artist are dating and sharing their lives:

“I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.”

They travel all over the world together, and after a while they move into a small apartment in Brooklyn. The apartment has bedbugs. The narrator’s boyfriend wants to focus on his art: he doesn’t want to get a better-paying job so they can move out. The narrator notes that she, and probably her boyfriend too, had reservations about the relationship: ultimately, she reflects, they were both afraid of being alone.



The narrator falls pregnant, and although she loves her newborn daughter, the baby cries and screams constantly. The couple can’t take her out or even have friends visit. The narrator struggles with the expectation to be a good mother:

“‘Put a hat on that baby,’ said every old biddy that passed me. But the devil baby cleverly dispatched with them to ride bareheaded in the freezing rain and wind.”

Money is even tighter, and the husband is forced to take a job recording sound for TV commercials. He is frustrated, but it still doesn’t solve their financial difficulties. The narrator takes on better-paying work as well, ghostwriting for a man she calls “Almost Astronaut.” This man is so interested in space exploration that he wants to write a book about it (even though he can’t write). She also takes teaching work.



The narrator loves her daughter, but she is finding the role of motherhood increasingly unsatisfying. Meanwhile, the apartment still has bedbugs: nothing they do seems to get rid of them. Finally, they find a new apartment they can afford. But this novelty doesn’t satisfy the narrator’s craving for change and greater fulfilment. She imagines even more dramatic changes they could be making.

Time passes, and the couple grows more and more unhappy. The narrator begins to refer to herself in the third person, as “the wife,” as she discovers that her husband is having an affair. The husband apologizes and promises to repair their marriage, but the wife doesn’t believe it can be done:

“If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never . . . outrun entropy.”



They decide to attend couples therapy, but their marriage does not improve. The wife seeks out her husband’s lover and is hurt to realize that the lover looks like a younger version of herself.

The wife is miserable, and increasingly all she can think of is divorce. Her husband is still making every effort to repair their marriage, but nothing is working. One day the wife begins to suspect that her husband is seeing his lover again. He denies it, but she discovers that he has been messaging her. The wife begins to reflect with deep regret on her life choices—the alternative lives she could have led.

In a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, the couple move out of the city. The daughter struggles to adjust at first, but soon she is happier. The couple continue to fight, but increasingly the wife keeps her discontents to herself, indulging instead in a fantasy that she will run away. The first-person “I” creeps back into the narrative.



Winter falls in the countryside, and the narrator sees her daughter off to school. She has accepted her life, her fate, but the setting casts an atmosphere of bleakness and defeat over this acceptance.

Dept. of Speculation explores the challenges of marriage and motherhood with an unsparing eye. Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation was well received by critics­—“Clever, subtle, and rife with strokes of beauty” (Publishers’ Weekly)—although some reviewers noted that it is “sometimes puzzling” (Kirkus Reviews) due to its constant shifts in point of view and jumps in time.