Customer Reviews

Last Things

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

My girlfriend and I have spent the past week reading this book aloud to each other; most books don't stand up to that kind of abuse. But Offill's sentences are so carefully, artlessly constructed, that they float off the page, and the story's momentum carried us forward into many a sleepless spring night. The protagonist, an eight year old girl who describes the steady deterioration of her mother's sanity and family structure, has a clarity of tone that anchors the book's wonderful off kilterness in a solid, utterly believable foundation. Events unfold so unpredictably, but with such authority and control on Offill's part -- in the past, we'd given ourselves over to a book only to feel betrayed at the end. With Last Things, we felt rewarded, and lucky. This is a book to treasure and tell friends about.

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.

Offill has a poet's command of language--her prose is breathtaking. And the story is utterly compelling: I found the characters fascinating. (I wished only to know a little more about Grace's father.) This novel *is* worthy of the comparison to Marilynne Robinson's *Housekeeping*.

Offill's "Last Things" is a fine first effort. Her writing is spare and often powerful. While the intent of the book seems to be an attempt at defining the space between the worlds of rational reality and pure imagination, Offill does at times take things a bit too far. The author obviously spent much time collecting odd facts. Her story is seriously littered with them. All too often they seem trite and tacked-on, adding unnecessary weight to the book, and failing to inform the reader in any way meaningful to the progression of the story. Though the tone is often comic (sometimes just plain weird), "Last Things" is a tragedy. Young Grace Davitt is abandoned by her mother at an age when she is ill-equipped to understand the import and impact of adult actions. Grace appears, even for an eight year-old, oddly detached to the very end. This may be by design, Offill having built into Grace's character seeds of her mother's madness. Or not. At any rate, this otherwise wondrous little collection of all things strange suffers from an overall sense of detachment and lack of clarity.

Last Things' by Jenny Offill is that rare novel that immediately draws you in and intimately involves you with the lives and feelings of remarkable characters. Grace Davitt, the eight-year old narrator speaks in an absolutely compelling voice that is not tainted by adult judgement or coloration. She processes information as she receives it and is caught in the abyss between a rationalistic scientist father and a unique and engaging ornothologist mother who is going mad.The mother Anna is beautifully drawn; we see through her creativity, impulsivity, and inconsistency the power of her increasingly mad view of life. Offill's prose is concise and powerful; not a word seems out-of-place or wasted. Her subtle humor, the interweaving of the themes of extinction, myth, relationships, and family were riveting to me. I've read 'Last Things' twice and will go back to it again. I highly recommend it to you; you will not be disappointed.

i loved this book. the writing was incredible. also, i thought the narrator, a young girl, was very believable, and telling the story from her perspective makes the story all the more moving. there is a lot of creativity here, especially in the character of the mother. read it!

While a large number of fiction writers puts thoughts in their characters'heads, creating cardboard cut-outs rather than human beings, she puts thoughts into readers' heads. Her world is populated with people and things, and being lost in it is a privilege.