Vera licked his stamps for him.” But life, of course, gets in the way, and instead of writing her second book, the protagonist (she and her husband remain nameless throughout, only ever referred to by the roles they inhabit in their marriage) finds herself pacing the aisles of Rite Aid – the only place her baby will stop crying – and obsessing over emergency precautions for the many disasters that could befall her daughter. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. “Women almost never become art monsters,” we’re informed, “because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.
What Offill lays most bare is the stripping of selfhood that marriage and motherhood entail, and the suffering this inflicts on a woman who wanted to be an “art monster”.
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