Last Things [Hardcover]

Jenny Offill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

A spare, bewitching debut that explores the delicate line separating science from myth and creativity from madness.

Last Things tells the story of Grace Davitt, an eight-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small lakeside town in Vermont. Her mother, Anna, an ornithologist, once saw a monster in this lake, which she believes may be a dinosaur that has somehow escaped extinction. Each morning, she photographs the dark water, hoping it will reappear. To Grace, the monster is more evidence that the world is full of mysterious things most people will never see. From her boy-genius baby-sitter, she has learned about invisible black holes from which no one can escape. From her mother, she has heard about the hyena men of Africa who devour their wives in their sleep. From The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, she has learned about children raised by wolves and men who suddenly burst into flames.

It is only Grace's father, a dedicated rationalist, who teaches her that the world is, in fact, well ordered and reasonable. For him the only truth is science, and, increasingly, he finds himself shut out by Anna as she draws Grace deeper and deeper into a strange world of myth and obsession.

Touching on extinction, madness, the breakdown of family, and, intriguingly, the way science can encourage contradictory readings of the world, Last Things will surely be hailed as one of the most assured and lyrical first novels of the year.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374184054
• ISBN-13: 978-0374184056
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,831,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars WELL-WRITTEN, COMPELLING, UNSETTLING..., December 12, 2001

By 

Larry L. Looney (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Last Things (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In a Child's Voice, May 16, 2000

By 

danny grosso - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Things (Paperback)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Charming and Magical, January 24, 2000

By 

C. Mummert (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Things (Hardcover)

I enjoyed this book immensely. I think the narrative structure device using the history of the universe in relation to the period of 365 days is incredibly effective. The characters are a little shaky on the descriptive end, however I'm not certain that this isn't intentional in order to magnify the "magical realist" aspect of the narrative. In general, I found the book haunting and resonant in many ways. I look forward to reading the next novel Ms. Offill.