The Life of the Mind

Dorothy, or DoDo to her friends, is having a miscarriage. But honestly, it's more of an inconvenience in her mind than it is a trauma - life is traumatic enough as it is after all. But as the weeks pass by, she finds herself still feeling the side-effects that she was assured would pass within days. Struggling with her own mind, with knowing that refusing Motherhood is a feminist right but still feeling like a failure as well. Unable to confide her deepest thoughts in anyway, not even her two therapists, Dorothy searches for answers and meaning in places she'd never thought to look before.

"Dorothy could not be sure if she meant to imply that a life of mourning was an exercise in nobility or a pathetic waste, or both, or neither."

The Life of the Mind is an unapologetically, shamelessly vivid and brutally blunt exploration into womanhood and motherhood - cleverly delivering hard-hitting truths about the world we live in and their entitlement towards the female body. This book will most definitely make some readers recoil in disgust because of it's frank depictions of bodily functions but of course, aren't we used to women not discussing these things?

Told through a cold, apathetic and somewhat detached voice that keeps us almost at arms length, most of this book is told through Dorothy's inner monologue. Observant, curious but not emotional - she was an odd narrator, I can't say I particularly liked her but she intrigued me.

Highly imaginative and descriptive, this sharp and provocative novel has no journey or direction, just a character trying to make sense of her life and a snapshot of a woman struggling to find the words to say exactly what she needs to change.

"The Life of the Mind" is a very impressive debut, and comparisons with Sally Rooney and Otessa Moshfegh feel spot on. Christine Smallwood introduces to Dorothy, an adjunct professor of English Literature in New York who has recently had a miscarriages. We see Dorothy alone and in company over the weeks that follow as she teaches her classes, travels to Las Vegas for a conference and attends a wealthy friend's party.

Dorothy is a highly sympathetic character - Smallwood writes in the third person, but we see everything from Dorothy's point of view. Her observations are thoughtful and perceptive, but also wry and detached. One of the things that stood out about the novel is how burdened Dorothy is by nearly all her relationships with others (especially other women): her friends, her fellow academics, her former doctoral supervisor, her mother and even, ironically, her two therapists. They tactlessly foist their confidences on her, while she is largely left to process her own miscarriage alone. In this way, she also puts me in mind of the "excellent women" who populate Barbara Pym's novels who undertake so much emotional labour on behalf of others.

The novel is moving and unflinching (including anatomically) in its account of Dorothy's experiences, but also full of dry humour, whether describing an underwater puppet show, karaoke or a friend's romantic intrigues.

I really enjoyed this book. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review!

"Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail"

From the opening line (an if you recoil at that, this won't be a book for you), Smallwood lays bare her intentions: this is a book which is smart and upfront about the way life is experienced through both mind and body. Dorothy is an adjunct literature professor in a private US college (what in the UK we term a postgrad sessional lecturer, usually paid by the hour, with a timetable that shifts term to term and with no security or firm basis for building an academic career), one of those disaffected women (she's in the 30s, rather than 20s, but may be younger in life/career terms due to grad school/PhD) who is dissatisfied with everything: her relationship with her live-in boyfriend is lukewarm, her friends are either academically successful and out of reach or struggling with motherhood, her career teaching a course on apocalypse literature is going nowhere and her own writing is ending up consistently deleted. On top of this, Dorothy is dealing with an induced miscarriage and all the ways that her body is asserting itself insistently: blood and bleeding punctuates the text, a reminder of the kind of (female) corporeality which has conventionally been written out of literature.

I liked the smartness of the thinking behind this book as it uses academic theory and literature to carry its thinking. Also the fine irony of that title as it satirises the realities for so many young academics where 'the life of the mind' is actually a constant juggling of multiple jobs, including minimum wage positions, just to pay the rent while holding out hope of a permanent position. On top of that, the books adds a feminist perspective that centralises the fact of female bodies. Names appear important: Dorothy reminded my of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimages, and Judith made me think of Judith Butler, one of the leading theorists of the body.

For all the good stuff, this is a book which slightly outstays its welcome - the meandering telling hits lots of contemporary touchstones around pregnancy, the medical treatment of female bodies, miscarriage/abortion, mental health, career expectations and the reality, mediocre relationships so it's perhaps less fresh than it could be. All the same, I like the smartness of the vision and the refusal to be coy about bodily functions in all their messy materiality.