The Story of Stupidity." Offill delivers a light cynicism with feather strokes of language, and even in moments of dramatic fracture, where so much is omitted that in the rush of time she offers only glimpses of the domestic drama, the dramatic arc unravels with a compelling and engaging sense of fulfillment. The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, nor that her genius babysitter should sit in a chair "reading a book called It comes as no surprise that Grace's favorite book in this engaging mayhem is Short declarative sentences like "I had once seen my father eat a raisin-and-mayonnaise sandwich when there was nothing else around" are almost instantly followed by only more enlightenment: "Once, when my mother went away for a weekend, he read me an entire book about the evolution of squirrels." The storytelling is a wondrous mix of the associative and the chronological, with linear aspects so tied to the diverse elements of this novel of ideas (the meaning of life, the nature of the universe, the problem of family) that the effect is simply dazzling.
Surprising details are so frequent they become the norm, yet the plethora of such discoveries is never numbing. 'Listen, Grace,' she said, 'I think someone's speaking to us in code.'
My mother went to the window and rubbed away the steam.
Outside, the trees were breaking themselves into pieces. Throughout, a seamless, compressed lucidity characterizes the prose, which is at once descriptive and philosophic: "I sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched my mother put on her face. Both the reader and Grace must respond to these moments by trying to understand what appear to be anecdotes, but are actually bursts of stories within the larger story of the novel. While Jonathan is prone to pragmatism, Anna continually lives in a world of skewed invention, inspiring her daughter with a new alphabet and an array of knowledge that attempts to make sense of a random and arbitrary world. In the mid-1980's, Grace Davitt is a seven-year-old living in a small Vermont town, only child to Jonathan, a high-school chemistry teacher, and Anna, an underemployed ornithologist at the local raptor center. Last Things, captures the crucial years in the life of a young narrator trying to choose between a conventional but remote father and a mesmerizing but insane mother.
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