While it’s too fresh in my mind to say for sure, Offill’s much-anticipated follow-up is working the same bracing magic on my beleaguered brain. Years later, I still think of it (and its startling observations on everything from adultery to art monsters to sad, worn-out underwear) on a near-daily basis. 'Despite consuming a vast amount of novels, I’m terrible at remembering them, so I consider Jenny Offill’s 2014 book Dept. “Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun.” ( The New York Times)Ī highly unforgettable-sentence-to-listening-time ratio When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience - but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks.Īnd all the while the voices of the city keep floating in - funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.Īs Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. of Speculation - one of the New York Times Book Review 's 10 Best Books of the Year - a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept.

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