The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Last Things by Jenny Offill
Evelin Sullivan

Jenny Offill. Last Things. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. 264 pp. $23.00.

Last Things is a first novel of such depth and intelligence that reading it means swallowing a time-release capsule of delight and anguish: sudden-glory bursts of understanding keep disrupting a haunting sense of a world in which a long history of wrong turns is about to prove fatal.
Grace Davitt is a smart eight-year-old with a brilliant, troubled mother and a baffled father. Also featured are Edgar—an adolescent scientific genius—and an uncle who is Mr. Science on children’s TV. Grace, curious and embattled, is a compulsive observer who churns out questions about the world and gathers answers from sources of varying dubiousness. Anna Davitt tells her daughter myths of her own invention as adroitly as she tells authentic myths and “extinction stories.” Her home-schooling of Grace focuses on the “cosmic calendar” (January 1: the Big Bang . . . December 31: First humans), but Grace also gets input from the Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, Edgar, and Mr. Science. As a result, her brain roils with a rich brew of superstition and scientific and bogus facts.
Unknowingly, Grace follows a venerable tradition: that of seeing the world as a book readable by those who learn its language. Last Things brims with references to language, codes, messages encrypted in seemingly random clues. Learning to read the world means becoming adept at deciphering analogies and symbols. Alas, the solutions we find are mostly wrong, since the human mind is superb at inventing meaning where knowledge is lacking. Grace, incessantly processing myths, mysteries, facts, and claptrap, is a model of humankind trying to make sense of things by turning out ten thousand answers—about the universe, chance, love, dreams, the soul. Last Things, in the end, reveals the dark possibilities of this discovery process; the novel is propelled by the fear that although we are decoding the cosmic arcanum at an unprecedented rate, we may be too late to save ourselves. [Evelin Sullivan]