Art Monsters and Other Life Goals
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
I read Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill over a weekend in Calgary and Canmore. While my family and friends put together a coffee-table sized contoured moose head puzzle, I huddled in the corner of the couch with my book. That’s not entirely true - I had my book, my pencil case, and a few sub-standard sticky notes (the ones that curl and then don’t stick well - there should be a law). I need marking tools to read, a tick that’s only gotten worse with every week I read another post by Haley Larsen on Closely Reading.
Says more than words can say
When I finished reading, I wrote a quick reflection on my index card/bookmark: “Like. It’s complex. Says more than words can say.”
Is that a haiku? A book koan? How was I ever going to get anything out of that?!
Dept. of Speculation is a novel about a woman who wanted to be an art monster, ends up a mom and wife, and then, just as she’s remembering the lure of art monster life, finds herself fighting to be a mom and wife. I kind of love her, I kind of am her, and I kind of wish I were her, in the sene of wouldn't it be amazing if my pain created pages like this?
It’s not a novel in the form we’re used to seeing. The chapters are brief and divided into tiny sections that seem to jump around. These sections don’t fit together seamlessly, it’s not like looking closely at one piece of a puzzle and then a next until you see how they fit together. Each individual idea is brief, mentioned lightly, and then comes back over and over again.
It's not weaving - that would imply strands of thought you can pick up and follow. It's more like colorwork knitting. On the surface it’s even, but between those individual stitches, that yarn is drawn along and held in place behind the piece. The more colors knit into the work, the more careful the knitter has to be about keeping the strands organized when they’re back stage. Good colorwork knitting looks good from the front and the back. Neglected loops of yarn form hazards for the wearer and the piece. In Offill's book, I didn’t feel like there were loose ends.
Art Monsters
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
The narrator had plans before she met her husband, like so many young women do. This paragraph sent me to Derderer’s book, Monsters: a Fan's Dilemma looking for a definition of monsters, only to find a reference right back to Dept. of Speculation. I love it when my work circles back on itself like this. It tells me I’m swimming in the right pond, tugging at the right strings.
Derderer offers a couple definitions of art monster. One is that an art monster is “someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms." Think of Michael Jackson and how allegations about his behavior towards kids changes the way we see his work. Think of the recent revelations that Alice Munro abetted her husband’s abuse of her daughter, his stepdaughter.
My gut tells me that our narrator didn’t mean a monster in these ways, rather that she wanted to be able to work, just work. I remember that feeling. I remember it when I was moving to the Netherlands to stay with my partner who had to return to his home country. I remember it when I was applying for a job teaching English in order to have an income. I remember it when I held my son in those first months and years, when I talk to coaches and psychologists and friends about not being able to figure out what I should do because what I wanted to do (but didn’t admit) was write, but what I had to do was raise my children and support my husband.
And watching him succeed only made it harder. How do you wholeheartedly support your partner’s PhD defense when you know you’ll never get your own? How do you turn up for his work events and mingle with a bunch of people who aren’t interested in you if you know your turn isn’t coming?
Was Joan Didion an art monster for having child minders? For always writing about herself? For centering her perspective in every story?
Some ten chapters later, when she’s married and a mother and their daughter is old enough to pointedly use the word “autumn” instead of “fall,” she returns to her dream;
That night, I bring up my old art monster plan. 'Road not taken,' my husband says.
I can rage on her behalf at his dismissive response. There’s an enduring disparity where men (still) have the support of the partners to pursue their dreams while (some) women put theirs on hold in order to shoulder the physical burdens of pregnancy and breast feeding and then the unbalanced mental loads of running a household. Then one day, the woman says, “hey, what about me?”
From her partner’s perspective, she lacked focus. From her perspective, there was no time to focus.
And yes, you can substitute my name and my partner’s names there.
So what happens?
In Dept. of Speculation, things resolve, one way or another. Did you think I was going to spoil the ending for you?
In my house, we’re working on it. Part of that work is me insisting on my writing time and space. Part of it is demanding real support. Real support isn’t the space to do what I want to do, it’s taking action in order to make my dreams possible. It’s the opposite of being a monster. What is that, a fairy godmother? Why is it always a mother?
Offill would say it’s because fathers are absent.
"When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere."
"It's different, of course, with the art monsters. They are always elsewhere."
So, good read? Absolutely. Worth your time, get a copy, read it.
I’m going to keep working on Derderer’s book and also started listening to the audiobook of Stacy Schiff's Vera about Nabakov’s wife. Stay tuned.
Also - check out Marcie Maxfield’s book Em’s Awful Good Fortune. It’s a much closer to reality take on expat life than a lot of books out there. I liked it - plus it’s an award winner and Junot Diaz blurbed it!