Did not finish this book. I found it to be lacking, and unfortunately it could not hold my attention.

Oh how I wanted to love this book".. on paper this is 100% my kind of novel, I love dark flawed protagonists and when I saw it compared to moshfegh and broder I thought it’s bound to be a winner . Sadly it wasn’t for me ….
I found our narrator just utterly boring , not just unlikeable and annoying but just dull . The writing style is very literary which didn’t work for me and it was lacking the dark humour that often works well in these kind of books. The scenes talking about the aftermath of the miscarriage are also very graphic so do not pick this up if this is a sensitive topic for you .

A woman in academia, attempting to reconcile the pointlessness of her work with the crumbling world around her. A depressed woman moving. The narrative centres a miscarriage, a loss of life that the protagonist wasn’t overly concerned with in the first place. It has the trademark confessional stances on reproductive rights, women in the workplace, body autonomy and choice feminism. Throughout the author is inserting opinion into the characters rambling thoughts or meagre interactions with others but it felt so insincere. I attempted to reflect on why it is I enjoy tangential inner monologues from some of my characters, and find others extremely grating. The conclusion was, there is no reason, and no consistency in broad stroke opinions of characters and I would be concerned if someone said there was.

There are so many factors that contribute to whether or not you find a character interesting, insightful or down right infuriating, and that is why I think attempting to defend a fictional person is entirely futile. In the case of Life of a mind, I found the attempt to foreground meta ideas on the ending of the job market / the future of mothering / the lives our parents had, all too forced. It felt too easy to give this character swathes of room to expel every negative thought they’ve ever had, without confining it to any time or place constraints. I think it lacked context for me, no richness of environment or place to ground the story in something larger than its protagonist’s mind. I am not sure, it just made me irrationally frustrated to read of this woman, and perhaps that is a sign to take a break from this niche sub genre of averagely smart, mostly privileged women moving through the world expressing their own problems as the only problems.

This novel was blurbed as "the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), so I was really looking forward to reading this. But it's hard to live up to expectations and even though I can see Smallwood was trying very hard, I don't think she succeeded. It didn't have the wit of Moshfegh, nor the depth of thought of Rooney. Dorothy also isn't a very likable person. Not that a book needs to have a sympathetic character in order for it to be good, but Dorothy has just had a miscarriage, is having sort of an existential crisis; I know all about her bodily functions and about the blood in her underwear and I still don't care for her. Does that make me a terrible person? Or is there something wrong with the book? You tell me.
I will probably read Smallwood's next novel though, as there's talent hidden underneath it all.
If only the novel could have been more like its brilliant first line:
"Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail."
Thank you Europe Editions and Netgalley for the ARC.

"The Life of the Mind" is a very impressive debut, and comparisons with Sally Rooney and Otessa Moshfegh feel spot on. Christine Smallwood introduces to Dorothy, an adjunct professor of English Literature in New York who has recently had a miscarriages. We see Dorothy alone and in company over the weeks that follow as she teaches her classes, travels to Las Vegas for a conference and attends a wealthy friend's party.

Dorothy is a highly sympathetic character - Smallwood writes in the third person, but we see everything from Dorothy's point of view. Her observations are thoughtful and perceptive, but also wry and detached. One of the things that stood out about the novel is how burdened Dorothy is by nearly all her relationships with others (especially other women): her friends, her fellow academics, her former doctoral supervisor, her mother and even, ironically, her two therapists. They tactlessly foist their confidences on her, while she is largely left to process her own miscarriage alone. In this way, she also puts me in mind of the "excellent women" who populate Barbara Pym's novels who undertake so much emotional labour on behalf of others.

The novel is moving and unflinching (including anatomically) in its account of Dorothy's experiences, but also full of dry humour, whether describing an underwater puppet show, karaoke or a friend's romantic intrigues.

I really enjoyed this book. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review!

Dorothy, or DoDo to her friends, is having a miscarriage. But honestly, it's more of an inconvenience in her mind than it is a trauma - life is traumatic enough as it is after all. But as the weeks pass by, she finds herself still feeling the side-effects that she was assured would pass within days. Struggling with her own mind, with knowing that refusing Motherhood is a feminist right but still feeling like a failure as well. Unable to confide her deepest thoughts in anyway, not even her two therapists, Dorothy searches for answers and meaning in places she'd never thought to look before.

"Dorothy could not be sure if she meant to imply that a life of mourning was an exercise in nobility or a pathetic waste, or both, or neither."

The Life of the Mind is an unapologetically, shamelessly vivid and brutally blunt exploration into womanhood and motherhood - cleverly delivering hard-hitting truths about the world we live in and their entitlement towards the female body. This book will most definitely make some readers recoil in disgust because of it's frank depictions of bodily functions but of course, aren't we used to women not discussing these things?

Told through a cold, apathetic and somewhat detached voice that keeps us almost at arms length, most of this book is told through Dorothy's inner monologue. Observant, curious but not emotional - she was an odd narrator, I can't say I particularly liked her but she intrigued me.

Highly imaginative and descriptive, this sharp and provocative novel has no journey or direction, just a character trying to make sense of her life and a snapshot of a woman struggling to find the words to say exactly what she needs to change.

The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood is a character-driven novel about a disaffected literature professor and her relationship with her body, her work, her friends, therapy.

Christine Smallwood’s compelling first novel’s centred on Dorothy who exists in a state of “comfortable precarity,” trapped in, what she calls “the twisted metal catastrophe of real life.” Dorothy’s an instantly recognisable character, the kind you might find in the pages of a book by Ottessa Moshfegh, Jenny Offill or Sheila Heti: young but not that young, smart but obsessive, weighed down by anxiety. A part-time, literature professor, at a time when universities are just another casualty in a long list of crumbling institutions, Dorothy teaches a course on the apocalyptic. The topic's indicative of her state of mind and her preoccupations with what’s happening in the wider world. But an unexpected failed pregnancy, and a medical miscarriage, confronts Dorothy with her bodily self, and her time’s suddenly taken up with assessing the bloody fall-out.

From the nod to Hannah Arendt in its title onwards, The Life of the Mind’s a highly referential, self-consciously literary piece: passages draw directly on Kafka, Thomas Mann and even Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca; the spirit of Baudrillard haunts the depiction of a trip to an academic conference in Vegas. Everything’s seen from Dorothy’s perspective and Dorothy can only think in literary terms. But at the same time Dorothy’s conscious of the absurdity of her profession: her rival Alexandra’s a rising star in academic circles because of her theories on the politics of doors in the Victorian novel, her phenomenally successful, former supervisor Judith – a possible stand-in for Judith Butler – is a manipulative, attention-seeker who encourages her students to compete for crumbs of approval. Smallwood’s narrative’s brief but dense yet, despite its explicit intertextuality, relatable and accessible. It’s a little overwritten at times and some sections, like a Karaoke sequence at a party, fall flat but for the most part it’s extremely funny, infused with a kind of biting wit. Using the aftermath of a miscarriage as a way to structure Dorothy’s story’s unusual but surprisingly effective, and it’s a fitting metaphor for Dorothy’s life experiences, her stalled career, her abandoned attempts at writing. Although Smallwood’s book’s not quite as rich or varied as similar work I’ve read, it’s a very promising, intelligent debut and I look forward to reading more of her fiction in the future.

Thanks to Netgalley UK and publisher Europa Editions for an arc

This novel features my favourite trope - the depressed woman moving through the lens of her academic life and her personal relationships as she examines her identity both as a mother and an academic. We follow Dorothy while she suffers a miscarriage that she keeps secret from everyone except her husband and how this affects her in her daily life. We are privy to the internal landscape of her brain as she struggles to function without telling anyone this has occurred. We learn about her relationship to her body and the idea of motherhood.

Slight trigger warning on the topic of miscarriage as the opening section of the book contains some graphic descriptions of the physical process which some readers may find hard to read but those who manage to stick with it will be rewarded with a very insular and striking illuminating book, beautifully well done literary fiction.

I am expecting this one to blow up along the lines of My Year Of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh,

"Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail"

From the opening line (an if you recoil at that, this won't be a book for you), Smallwood lays bare her intentions: this is a book which is smart and upfront about the way life is experienced through both mind and body. Dorothy is an adjunct literature professor in a private US college (what in the UK we term a postgrad sessional lecturer, usually paid by the hour, with a timetable that shifts term to term and with no security or firm basis for building an academic career), one of those disaffected women (she's in the 30s, rather than 20s, but may be younger in life/career terms due to grad school/PhD) who is dissatisfied with everything: her relationship with her live-in boyfriend is lukewarm, her friends are either academically successful and out of reach or struggling with motherhood, her career teaching a course on apocalypse literature is going nowhere and her own writing is ending up consistently deleted. On top of this, Dorothy is dealing with an induced miscarriage and all the ways that her body is asserting itself insistently: blood and bleeding punctuates the text, a reminder of the kind of (female) corporeality which has conventionally been written out of literature.

I liked the smartness of the thinking behind this book as it uses academic theory and literature to carry its thinking. Also the fine irony of that title as it satirises the realities for so many young academics where 'the life of the mind' is actually a constant juggling of multiple jobs, including minimum wage positions, just to pay the rent while holding out hope of a permanent position. On top of that, the books adds a feminist perspective that centralises the fact of female bodies. Names appear important: Dorothy reminded my of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimages, and Judith made me think of Judith Butler, one of the leading theorists of the body.

For all the good stuff, this is a book which slightly outstays its welcome - the meandering telling hits lots of contemporary touchstones around pregnancy, the medical treatment of female bodies, miscarriage/abortion, mental health, career expectations and the reality, mediocre relationships so it's perhaps less fresh than it could be. All the same, I like the smartness of the vision and the refusal to be coy about bodily functions in all their messy materiality.