The Life of the Mind - by Christine Smallwood (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"As an adjunct professor of English with a draining and tedious courseload, Dorothy feels "like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had no idea what else to do but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise." No one but her partner knows that she's just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists--Dorothy being the kind of person who begins seeing a second because she's too conflict-averse to break things off with the first. It's not so much that Dorothy is ashamed of the miscarriage itself as she is of the sense of purpose the prospect of motherhood had provided, of how much she'd wanted it. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure? (That's another thing she's ashamed of.) The Life of the Mind is a novel about endings: of youth, of aspirations, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet our minds are all we have to make sense of a world largely out of our control--which is to say our world; a world where things happen, but there is no plot. And so Dorothy must make do with what she has, as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides. Often witty and consistently alive to how stories end and begin again, The Life of the Mind is a moving, darkly funny, and starkly original examination of how life, as they say, goes on"--<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><b>"[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying."--Jia Tolentino, <i>The New Yorker</i> <p/>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" (<i>Publishers Weekly, </i> starred review)<br></b><br>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? <p/>Piercingly intelligent and darkly funny, <i>The Life of the Mind</i> 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.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"One of the wittiest, most deliciously farcical novels I've read in a long time."<b>--NPR, <i>Fresh Air</i></b> <p/>"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."<b>--John Williams</b>, <b><i>The New York Times</i></b> <p/>"This book made me laugh out loud."<b>--<i>The New York Review of Books</i></b> <p/>"[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."<b>--Sam Sacks, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i></b> <p/>"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. <i>The Life of the Mind</i> is hilarious, recognizable, and helplessly wise--a perfect foil for its namesake."<b>--Rivka Galchen, author of <i>Little Labors</i></b> <p/>"<i>The Life of the Mind</i> is brilliant and pleasurable, funny and dark, cerebral and visceral--a must-read for the bleeding human survivors of the modern age."<b>--Melissa Broder, author of <i>The Pisces</i> and <i>Milk Fed</i></b> <p/>"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 <i>Desperate Characters </i>and Gary Indiana's <i>Horse Crazy, The Life of the Mind </i>is urgent, essential reading for our troubling times."<b>--Andrew Martin, author of <i>Early Work </i>and <i>Cool for America <br></i></b><br>"<i>The Life of the Mind </i>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."<b>--Christopher Beha, author of <i>The Index of Self-Destructive Acts</i></b><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Christine Smallwood</b>'s fiction has appeared in <i>The Paris Review, n+1, </i> and <i>Vice</i>. Her reviews, essays, and cultural reporting have been published in many magazines, including <i>The New Yorker, Bookforum, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, </i>and <i>The New York Times Magazine</i>, where she is a contributing writer. She has also written the "New Books" column for <i>Harper's Magazine</i>, where she is a contributing editor, and been an editor at <i>The Nation</i>. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, is a founding faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
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