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The Life of the Mind

di Christine Smallwood

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
1604169,462 (3.39)6
"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"--… (altro)
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Mostra 4 di 4
This was one book I really, really didn’t get, so I’m staying away from rating it.

If you were not aware, academic institutions maintain some of their brightest students in a form of indentured slavery.

These graduates teach undergraduates a few courses and earn just barely enough to live in a closet with their likewise underpaid lovers, or maybe in their mom’s trailer.

They don’t get benefits. They don’t get tenure. And they sure don’t get rich.

This book is a satire of the bitter bitchiness between the poor sods who compete for deck chairs on the Titanic of academic richesse, and a swipe at the loathsome right who declare women’s reproductive rights non-existent.

Smallwood gets pretty graphic in depicting women who have performed homestyle births and abortions, almost as though the abortions are metaphors for their dead end intellectual careers.

I’d have to go back to the 18th century to find another book written by man or woman to compare with this brazen scatological humour. Or possibly just back to John Barth’s Fieldingesque bildungsroman, The Sot-Weed Factor.

Psychoanalysis plays a very big role in this story, for after all, anybody who accepts this life ought to have her head read.

And I highly advise reading this book after breakfast. You’ll thank me.
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
Oooof. Do I dare call it... lifeless? ( )
  cbwalsh | Sep 13, 2023 |
Dorothy is an adjunct professor of English who is going though a miscarriage. She is ungrounded and haunted by her lack of progress and her tendency to measure herself against other women grad students and her mentor.
I thought the book was funny and frank, especially when she mentions things about her body that you normally think of as gross. She quotes lots of literary idols, sometimes to the detriment of the story, as they are not well integrated and seem like interruptions.
Lauren Berlant "cruel optimism" seems to define her life--people who remain attached to fantasies and aspirations of the good life.--stuckness
She has a lot to say about time "Life was increasingly filled with melancholy sounds like this, digital reproductions or replacements of analog sounds, reminders of historical periods gone by, One day these digital tones would not be heard in reference to the past."
Of the book Learning From Las Vegas, she owned but never read "It was just another false start, another purchase toward the identity of a person she had turned out not to be." Reminds me of all the art books I've purchased and never read. ( )
  BarbaraPoore | Mar 28, 2023 |
This book ended up on many best of the year lists. It also seemed like an interesting topic. Dorothy is an adjunct teacher who is not having success getting a permanent position. She also just had a miscarraige that continues to cause bleeding etc. No one except her partner Rog knows that she was even pregnant. This is the backdrop to the book. It takes place in her head where Dorothy analyzes every little thing. She is always worried about her actions and it is no surprise that she is seeing 2 therapists with 2nd being used for Dorothy to talk about the first. What makes this book so good is Dorothy is very funny and her comments remind me of an excellent stand up comedian telling funny stories. The book was 240 pages so it is one you can stick with. I don't think I would have enjoyed 400 pages of Dorothy but at 240 it was okay. Good insights into academia and the competition for jobs and books etc. This was debut novel and I look forward to her next one. ( )
  nivramkoorb | Apr 13, 2022 |
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"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"--

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