The Life of the Mind

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, The Atlantic, Electric Lit, Thrillist, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews • A witty, intelligent novel of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction—“the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

“[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage—not her mother, her best friend, or her therapists (Dorothy has two of them). She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother. So why does Dorothy feel like a failure?
 
The Life of the Mind is a book about endings—of youth, of ambition, of possibility, but also of the meaning that an inquiring mind can find in the mess of daily experience. Mordant and remorselessly wise, this jewel of a debut cuts incisively into life as we live it, and how we think of it.

Über den Autor / die Autorin

Christine Smallwood

Zusammenfassung

“[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
 
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • Electric Lit • Kirkus Reviews • A witty, intelligent novel of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction—“the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with no hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists—Dorothy has two of them. Nor can she bring herself to tell the other women in her life: her friends, her doctor, her mentor, her mother. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure?

Piercingly intelligent and darkly funny, The Life of the Mind is a novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet Dorothy’s mind is all she has to make sense of a world largely out of her control, one where disaster looms and is already here, where things happen but there is no plot. There is meaning, however, if Dorothy figures out where to look, and as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides, she finds it in the most unlikely places, from a Las Vegas poolside to a living room karaoke session. In literature—as Dorothy well knows—stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.

Zusatztext

“One of the wittiest, most deliciously farcical novels I’ve read in a long time.”—NPR, Fresh Air

“Smallwood, on the evidence of this one book—and one can only eagerly await more—is a delightfully stylish rambler; a conjurer of a heightened, carefully choreographed version of consciousness. Reading her is like watching an accomplished figure skater doing a freestyle routine. You’re never less than confident in the performance, and often dazzled…. In Smallwood’s hands, even twilight is plenty bright.”—John Williams, The New York Times

“This book made me laugh out loud.”—The New York Review of Books

“[An] excellent debut . . . Smallwood’s streak of dry, dark humor does much to dispel any restlessness . . . and the vignettes include some superb glancing satires of academia and the psychiatric racket. But it’s the miscarriage, treated not as a literary device but as a fact in itself, that occasions the best passages.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“I loved this novel for illuminating how the stories we tell ourselves are such cozy cousins with the clever lies we tell ourselves. But also I loved this novel because it was very, very, very fun to read. The Life of the Mind is hilarious, recognizable, and helplessly wise—a perfect foil for its namesake.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

“The Life of the Mind is brilliant and pleasurable, funny and dark, cerebral and visceral—a must-read for the bleeding human survivors of the modern age.”—Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and Milk Fed

“Christine Smallwood’s debut novel is that rare thing: an intellectual page-turner that commands one’s attention completely from the first sentence to the final line. A worthy heir to contemporary classics like Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy, The Life of the Mind is urgent, essential reading for our troubling times.”—Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Cool for America 

“The Life of the Mind is a wonderful novel about a life (and a mind) that refuses to behave novelistically. The book is smart, sharp, often very funny, and, in its commitment to truth over beauty, absolutely fearless.”—Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Christine Smallwood
• Verlag: Hogarth US
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 15.03.2022
• EAN: 9780593229910
• ISBN: 978-0-593-22991-0
• Seiten: 240
• Abmessung: 131 mm x 203 mm x 12 mm
• Thema: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur