Smallwood is a shrewd cultural critic ... and her writing about the academic world during the 'decadent twilight of the profession' has the ring of truth. Smallwood’s references to Kafka and Kant and Thomas Mann never feel like intellectual preening ... there isn’t a moment when Smallwood feels bogged down, by grad-school cogitation or anything else ... Smallwood’s novel is a good argument for judging a book by the sole (but high) standard of the liveliness and incisiveness of its prose. The book’s premise is not ingenious. The mechanics of its plot are not particularly important. (Things even sag a bit when Dorothy lands at an academic conference in Las Vegas and moves through the city and her human interactions there in a more conventional storylike way.) Its treatment of reproductive desires, ambivalences and disappointments is bold but hardly revolutionary in 2021. But Smallwood, on the evidence of this one book—and one can only eagerly await more—is a delightfully stylish rambler; a conjurer of a heightened, carefully choreographed version of consciousness. Reading her is like watching an accomplished figure skater doing a freestyle routine. You’re never less than confident in the performance, and often dazzled.
This book made me laugh out loud; its pages are marked by a snorting ungenerous glee that is at times indistinguishable from despair, and if some of its language feels more epigrammatically poised than Dorothy herself might be capable of, more perfectly paced and timed, well, I never thought that Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim Dixon owned all his good lines either. Smallwood likes long sentences and fully developed scenes; she avoids the collage-like assemblage of bits that marks...recent novels ... And she also likes risk. Dorothy’s miscarriage isn’t only a miscarriage, for all the physical precision with which it’s described; it’s also a metaphor, it’s how she sees herself, believing that her life of promise, of privilege even, has failed to develop as it should ... a good ending—it made me wince, and laugh, and it reminded me that The Life of the Mind is a campus novel ... Christine Smallwood has nevertheless managed to link Dorothy’s contingent labor to the problems of American society at large. I enjoyed these pages for the exceptional wit and polish of their prose. I’m remembering them for other things as well.
Consider Dorothy, the protagonist of Christine Smallwood’s jewel of a début novel ... Like many of the people who will love this novel, Dorothy is either tremendously depressed and dysfunctional or completely ordinary and doing pretty well ... Smallwood generates a bounty of humor from the chasm between the kind of things Dorothy thinks...and the kinds of things she does ... Smallwood begins a sentence by writing, 'I am not saying that the scholarly critical endeavor is a futile one, necessarily.' This sentiment, extremely funny in [the] context [of Smallwood's dissertation], is applied to even sharper effect in the novel, where scholarly critical endeavor is both Dorothy’s primary approach to understanding the world and the process by which she constantly dissociates from it ... Smallwood’s casually agonized and abundantly satisfying novel...provides the exact sort of thrill that can be found only through obsessive overthinking. Why live in the moment when you can dissect it like this?
The Life of the Mind is about endings that dribble to a close, the inexorable erosion of dreams, the slow leak of youthful buoyancy. It's about being young-ish at a time in history when it feels like many things might be fading away, including the natural world. The great accomplishment of Smallwood's taut novel is that while it is, indeed, about all those grim subjects, it's also one of the wittiest, most deliciously farcical novels I've read in a long time.
It isn’t that you must have had an abortion or a miscarriage or a pregnancy or even a vagina to be interested in reading Christine Smallwood’s first novel; it’s whether you have the stamina to spend 230 pages inside a deeply analytical brain struggling to make sense of a body that is itself struggling to process what is happening to it ... Time in this slim yet yawning book is slippery ... Dorothy is an interesting thinker and Smallwood can write a sentence. Yet at times they border on tenuous or tedious ... Occasionally, Dorothy’s allusions [...] resemble the clumsy spackling of a doctoral dissertation ... More interesting than her self-aware displays of knowledge are Dorothy’s blunt-edge observations ... These pared-back moments allow for breath, space, the slightest inflection of humor — and, most important, a rare glimpse of the narrator free from the anxiety of literary influence ... For her part, Smallwood is talented, and her work is unafraid of wading into the thicker, more literally visceral parts of female experience. I look forward to her next experiment in dissecting the sticky oddity of liminal existence.
Christine Smallwood’s debut novel, begins with an ending. We meet Dorothy, a contingent faculty member in the English department where she used to be a doctoral student, as she negotiates the miscarriage of an accidental pregnancy. The pregnancy, at once unexpected and welcome, is a blighted ovum, 'just tissue' according to her ob-gyn. The metaphor is clear: Dorothy’s academic career and the pregnancy are both projects of development and growth that never had a chance to thrive ... But the central relationship in the novel is between Dorothy and herself. Smallwood’s narration, its closeness verging on disgust, gives us access to indignities—major and minor, of body and mind—in gross, realistic detail. ... How can one live the life of the mind? To do that, perhaps, one must live in a world that protects some kinds of work as true vocations—a world where people believe that working in some environments lifts one out of one’s body and its detritus, towards an ethereal zone of pure thought.
... [an] excellent debut ... Its difficult heroine is Dorothy, an overqualified adjunct literature professor who is enduring the prolonged aftereffects of a miscarriage. The 'blight' in her womb, as her doctor calls it, reminds her all too readily of her barren career prospects and of the imperiled future of life on Earth in general. It’s a powerful metaphor, if fairly on the nose, and there are moments when the ax-grinding in The Life of the Mind is too predictable. Ms. Smallwood’s streak of dry, dark humor does much to dispel any restlessness, however, and the vignettes include some superb glancing satires of academia and the psychiatric racket. But it’s the miscarriage, treated not as a literary device but as a fact in itself, that occasions the best passages ... In one breathtaking scene set during an OB-GYN appointment, Dorothy is mesmerized by a sonogram of her empty womb ... And a bracing penultimate chapter that takes a hard, ambivalent look at another kind of termination—a friend’s abortion—leaves the novel in an aptly unsettling place of 'nonconclusion.'
Both books can be read as twists on the campus novel, a genre mastered by Mary McCarthy, David Lodge, and Zadie Smith, among others. Both provide doses of academic satire. Smallwood makes satire central to her project, introducing us to insecure grad students who, in her words, read aloud 'in the same tone one uses for driving directions or a recipe.' She describes 'paradigm-shifting' work in literary studies that seems trivial to the untrained eye (and often to the trained one). In a scene so funny I cried from laughing, she describes a grad student’s dissertation on 'the politics of doors.' ... these adjunct novels are versions of the bildungsroman, the novel of education—but here education means learning just how precarious your future is. Will these adjuncts be able to pay their rent, afford health care, bear and care for children? Will they have anything like the future they dreamed of when they were young? ... In both novels, plot—the literary structure that signals progress—gives way to an atmosphere of anxious uncertainty, one familiar to many of us who came of age during a moment of financial and ecological crisis ... This opening scene, impressively executed, sets the tone for the rest of the novel ... Smallwood’s achievement is to describe, with humor and precision, the affective conditions—what Dorothy’s students might call the 'vibe'—of a generation living at the end of the end of history but with very little sense of the future ... Although the novel presents emotional detachment as a way to cope with apocalyptic conditions, it also demonstrates a kind of giddy, resilient attachment: to texts, language, art, to what we might call the life of the mind. The novel is a critique of academia and its abhorrent labor practices, but it is also a celebration of humanistic learning.
Smallwood aptly captures Dorothy’s befuddled state: the discouraging, exhausting awareness that this day will be just like the day before, but also that she chose to do this. It is not that Dorothy feels entitled to this life but rather surprised to have found herself outside its walls. Did she turn left instead of right, or was there never a right turn in the first place? ... Dorothy’s miscarriage is a clever device, proffering a new realm for her investigatory tendencies to blossom and take hold ... If, at the conclusion of many a campus novel, the undergraduate is thrust into the world, no such advancement exists for the adjunct.
... excellent ... This isn’t a work of philosophy; Dorothy is mercifully light on 'deep thoughts.' The narration is also ironic in that it has many layers of signification: there are lots of gaps between what Dorothy says and what she thinks. She lives more in her head than in the world. In that way, the title is sincere ... This is an anti-Bildungsroman, without much epiphany or plot ... It’s melancholia that engenders reflexivity and consciousness. It’s melancholia, in other words, that brings about the life of the mind. It also brought about The Life of the Mind. And the fact of this novel, its creation, gave me some hope for Dorothy. She didn’t write this book, of course, but it feels like the funny and moving and true book that she might write if she ever worked through her own melancholy.
... coolly plotless ... savage ... powered by a sly acknowledgement of the inconvenient way real life eventually punctures fantasy, impeding the pursuit of dreams ... Smallwood’s novel suggests it is impossible to lead a life entirely devoted to the mind without both human nature and biology, in their infinite messiness, encroaching on it ... Smallwood’s novel revels in [dirt] to the point of ugliness, the body not just present but rebellious.
When she is most reflective, Smallwood reveals much about the meaning of an academic life at this present moment of extreme precarity, and ending without end ... Dorothy’s observations are delivered with acuity and slicing humor...It’s her mind’s attention that makes this novel so enjoyable, and it’s her mind’s attention that shows us what’s at stake.
... [a] quietly funny, deeply interiorized debut novel ... Dorothy...wonders plenty on the page, and remains in rich conversation with herself ... Readers will find this perceptive, cerebral, original, and easy to fall into.
... the brilliant story of a young academic powering through her existential dread ... Dorothy is an intensely cerebral creature. Her narration of interactions with others, whether exchanging text messages with a friend, giving money to a panhandler, or parrying with her peers, is filtered by literary analysis, often to hilarious effect ... Dorothy’s sharp, witty narration makes this book something special ... like the glorious love child of Otessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney.
