Last Things (Vintage Contemporaries), by Jenny Offill
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Last Things (Vintage Contemporaries), by Jenny Offill
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To eight-year-old Grace Davitt, the world is full of strange wonders. Through the eyes of her mother, Anna—an ornithologist who speaks five languages—their small lakeside town in Vermont becomes a glittering mystery filled with secret tongues, monsters in the lake, and birthday parties for the Earth. Anna’s untamed spirit stands in sharp contrast to that of Grace’s father, a chemistry teacher who examines his surroundings through the lens of rationalism and order. As Grace’s family begins to fall apart and she finds that she must choose between her parents, her conflicting loyalties take her on a remarkable journey that spans all corners of the country—and of her own boundless imagination.
Last Things (Vintage Contemporaries), by Jenny Offill- Amazon Sales Rank: #125378 in Books
- Brand: Offill, Jenny
- Published on: 2015-03-17
- Released on: 2015-03-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.02" h x .82" w x 5.15" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review "My mother knew a lot about spies and sometimes hinted that she had been one once. She knew a way, for example, to make an umbrella shoot a poison dart. Also that the CIA had tried to kill the president of Cuba with an exploding clam. She showed me how to send secret messages by underlining words in a newspaper and dropping it on a bench."
To 8-year-old Grace Davitt, her mother is a puzzling yet wonderful mystery. This is a woman who has seen a sea serpent in the lake, who paints a timeline of the universe (in which "one billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar") on the sewing-room wall, and who teaches her daughter a secret language which only they can speak. To the reader, however, it soon becomes clear that Anna Davitt is more than just eccentric. As her obsessions grow, her relationship with Grace's father, Robert, gradually deteriorates until at last the family breaks apart and Grace is left alone with her unstable mother.
Writing an adult novel from a young child's point of view is a tricky business, but Jenny Offill pulls it off without breaking a sweat. God is in the details here, and these are spot-on, from young Grace's fascination with the blind girl who lives in the neighborhood to her speculations about the prior tenant of the uninhabited dog house in the backyard. Grace inhabits that peculiar geography of childhood where all things are reasonable, from the descriptions of gazelle-boys in her Encyclopedia of the Unexplained to her mother's mercurial mood shifts. What makes Anna Davitt's spiral into madness so unnerving is the fact that to her daughter this is business as usual. Last Things has been compared to that other classic of unconventional childhood, Housekeeping; certainly Offill's debut is richly deserving of the company it keeps. --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly With an ornithologist mother who speaks five languages (including Pig Latin), who was also possibly a CIA spy, a cryptozoologist or just your average maniacal collector of eccentric facts, young Grace Davitt's coming-of-age story is a bizarre kind of linguistic ontological experiment. Her father is "Mr. Science," obsessed with physical data and categorical details to the point of abstraction. Grace's world is one that readers are unlikely ever to have encountered before; riding the line between whimsical and sinister, she is a unique protagonist. Oddly passive in the way that children considered unconventionally brilliant are sometimes deemed by observers, Grace takes control of her destiny, in the wake of her mother's unexplained disappearance, by reinventing language and metaphorizing her life. She continues with the rich and wacky legacy her mother has left her: home schooling; a "secret language" named Annic in which the alphabet's first 13 letters mirror the second 13, and the "cosmic calendar" in which one billion years of real time can be condensed into 24 days. Nothing in this narrative is standard fare: a bizarre mother-daughter road trip, a boy-genius babysitter, the Loch Ness monster and a recurrent theme of psychological anthropomorphism are among the plot elements. In spite of Grace's sometimes unlovable behavior, she is an engaging character. When she bullies a blind girl, Offil's point is clear; Grace's esoteric knowledge and novel socialization inform but cannot finally change the fact that she is a young girl on shaky ground. On the cusp of a definitively weird adolescence, she's brimming with the implosive, even brutal, energy of that impending transformation. Offill's debut is a rare feat of remarkable constraint and nearly miraculous construction of a most unique family. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Remarkable. . . . If ‘last things’ means things that will last, then Offill’s novel is one of them.” —The New York Times Book Review“Beautiful. . . . A gently funny tragedy about childhood and madness. . . . Pokes at the boundaries between reason and imagination.” —Newsday“Sparse, elegant, and inviting. . . . Jenny Offill . . . has created a fantastical family, at times loving and sweet, sorrowful and dangerous.” —The Boston Globe “Offill’s deceptively simple prose, her exquisite sense of metaphor and her ear for humor capture the subtle perceptions of this wise child so that we feel to the bone her burgeoning awareness.” —Chicago Tribune “Last Things mines an interval of childhood before the division of intellectual labor. In this state of innocence, science, philosophy, mythology, bunk, wonder, and sorrow are all one. Jenny Offill’s complicated and arresting farewell to this dangerous time is compelling as few recent novels on the subject have been.” —Rick Moody “Truly delightful.” —The Baltimore Sun “Stunning. . . . Dazzling. . . . A delightful novel, rich for its voracious eye onto real and imaginary moments of quandary in the lives of its characters and in the larger life of the universe.” —Ploughshares “[A] gem of a first novel.” —Los Angeles Times “Mesmerizing. . . . Pitch-perfect. . . . [Offill] writes with a heartbreaking clarity.” —The Times (London) “Offill’s debut is a rare feat of remarkable constraint and nearly miraculous construction of a most unique family.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
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Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful. WELL-WRITTEN, COMPELLING, UNSETTLING... By Larry L. Looney The reader gets a definite sense of the narrator's age in Jenny Offill's debut novel, LAST THINGS. She views everything she relates to us openly and unflinchingly, as a child would do -- and the things she doesn't completely understand are naturally colored with the myths and stories told to her by her increasingly deranged mother, combined with extrapolations produced by her own imagination.Grace's parents are incredibly mismatched. Her father is a complete realist, grounded in science and fact. He works as a teacher in the small Vermont town in which they live, until his objections to a prayer circle held within earshot of his office draw the disfavor of the administration. At one point, we are told that he proposed to her mother with the words 'You're the only woman I've met that will never bore me'. That's certainly proven to be true. Her mother -- who is an ornithologist working at a nearby raptor center -- is given to spouting native myths and beliefs from the far corners of the earth, sometimes obviously inventing stories on the spot to validate her increasingly odd actions. She sometimes speaks and writes in a language invented for her by her father, and attempts to teach it to Grace. When her pronouncements and beliefs begin to seep into her daughter's behavior at school, she vows to home-school young Grace, and the girl is pulled further into her mother's fantasy world.Children usually remember events clearly but in a spotty way -- when speaking of memories, they tend to bounce from one to the next, not concerned (as an adult narrator might be) with beginnings and endings, with smoothing out the rough edges of memory. They remember the parts that have the greatest emotional effect on them, either directly or obliquely. Offill has reproduced this tendency by giving her young storyteller an accurate voice -- it's not a stretch for us to imagine that we're listening to the story through Grace's own words. That being said, the writing is very polished and effective -- as the book spirals through scene after scene to its climax, the effect is very much like a wild dream that comes with the fever of an illness. It's a powerful current that draws the reader in, making the book difficult to put down.It's an interesting ride -- but there's an aching sadness left at the thought of what the shenanigans of Grace's parents are doing to her, to what sort of long-term effects they might have on the impressionable psyche of an 8-year-old girl. It makes me wonder if the two of them gave any thought to how they would raise a child once they had one. Her mother is hopeless, and her father, although he's a bit more grounded in reality, seems completely clueless in relating to his daughter. I can't imagine her emerging from this ordeal without having a fairly skewed view of the world.It's an odd little book -- but very skillfully written, interesting and entertaining. Sometimes it's pretty scary to look as an adult through the eyes of a child -- it makes for a compelling read.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. In a Child's Voice By danny grosso A tale of extrordinary people and circumstance, Jenny Offill's greatest feat is reaching back; somehow finding the unspoiled voice of childhood. Offill puts that voice to paper with great dexterity and wonder. Authors often assume different voices for their works. Offill here accepts the clumsy task of doing so with a child's parlance. Without unclouding the child's future,(a task that ruins so many similar works), Offill creates a moving story of a very gifted little girl, Grace, whose future is taxed by her mother's progressive mental illness. The beauty of the work is that, precocious as she unmistakably is, Grace does not see her own life, even her own mother, as beyond normalcy. The novel, in a sense claustrophobic is are many childrens' worlds, is also full of the innocent blue vistas that are a part of a child's ready euphoria. The juxtaposition of these two natures in childhood, and as embodied in Grace, are what makes this novel different and special. Grace has not yet been taught to honor the imaginary line between sanity and mental illness. Her resultant, innocent fealty to her sick mother is the endearing legacay of this story.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Sweet and sad, a lovely tale... By R. Peterson Another bittersweet book about a child in unusual circumstances. Grace is an eight-year-old girl whose mother, Anna is both a dream (for Grace) and a nightmare (for Anna herself). The mother and the father, Robert seem an interesting pair, she creative, bold, irrational and he patient, mainstream and rational. This is the tale of Anna who eventually goes mad, of Grace who doesn't understand that her mother is out of the norm, and Robert who loves but doesn't understand his wife and who eventually must be the stabilizing force for his daughter. The story is a sweet one as Grace is introduced to wild scientific, anthropological, linguistic, and mysterious theories by her mother (and her geeky teenaged babysitter). In fact, much of what Anna teaches Grace is that science can explain one side of an argument as often as it can explain the other side. I loved the various scientific puzzles, the imaginary language that Anna makes up for them, and the tales of hyena-men, gazelle-boys, and living dinosaurs. What is sad about it all is that as Anna's behavior becomes more manic and unstable, it all seems reasonable to Grace (who would not know better) who is blindly loyal to her mother. The family begins to dissolve when Grace's father begins to focus too intensely on his science (to the neglect of the family) and Anna takes Grace on a road-trip. The fact that this novel is written in Grace's voice is beautiful and is a hard feat that the author accomplishes admirably. The fact that the author manages to weave in themes of (animal) extinction, mental collapse, and the disintegration of a family is brilliant. It was so refreshing to read a book involving a child that was truly loving (even though it involved troubled souls, they clearly loved their little girl) and did not involve any hostility.
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