Art of the Sentence: Jenny Offill

“Once, as I lay in bed, a bright red sun appeared in the window. It bounced from side to side, then became a ball.

Life Equals structure plus productivity.

Studies suggest that reading makes enormous demands on the neurological system. One psychiatric journal claimed that African tribes needed more sleep after being taught to read. The French were great believers in such theories. During World War II, the largest rations went out to those engaged in arduous physical labor and those whose work involved reading and writing.”

Jenny Offill, Dept of Speculation (2014)

“Life equals structure plus productivity,” Jenny Offill writes in her novel Department of Speculation–one of the “fun facts” she comes across in her fact-checking job for “a science magazine.” Offill doesn’t labor in specificity–she doesn’t tell us which science magazine she works for, or which psychiatric journal she comes across the “fact” of African tribes needing more sleep when being taught to read. The implication is that it doesn’t matter which science magazine or which psychiatric journal–it could be any, they are interchangeable. Some writers argue for specificity, that it’s what readers want, that it makes for more powerful writing when there are concrete details, facts, and names. Instead, Offill uses names, details sparingly and does not bother to adequately cite the facts she is presenting. The facts are enough, and they speak for themselves. Does it really matter who she is quoting that said “life equals structure plus productivity”?

It doesn’t matter for the narrator to this novel, and therefore by implication it shouldn’t matter to us. However, for “fun” I Googled the quote verbatim to see if a specific speaker of it would come up. It didn’t. I found a site called “The Ultimate 30-Day Productivity Challenge” (no, thank you), something about pension reform, some blog about “theblissfulmind” that thinks it can tell me how to “create more structure in your life” and most no-thank-you-y, “The Biological Productivity of the Ocean,” (by Nature.com, which *could* or might as well be the journal that Offill’s character is fact-checking for).

Offill’s writing about her (character’s) experience fact-checking shows the reader how this job influenced her thinking in her life as she “once … lay in bed” and “a bright red sun appeared in the window” that “bounced from side to side, then became a ball.” Did the sun “factually” become a ball? No. It was a ball the whole time, but not recognized as a fact until she observed it “becoming.” But the sun/ball did prod her (character) into thinking about life, structure, and productivity–and writing and reading–placing into context the narrative beauty of her life as framed in this novel. If the ocean is as productive as our American, Puritanical upbringing would have us believe, then I would be shocked. “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished,” Lao Tzu purportedly said/wrote. It is this productivity and natural tension that Offill so skillfully works with as her writing flow from the art form of the sun/ball blending into her “art of fact.”