The country house (Dept. of Speculation)
Unnamed or fictional setting in Dept. of Speculation; pinned at a best-guess location within Pennsylvania.
At a glance
| Source | Author | Role | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dept. Of Speculation.md | Jenny Offill | setting | After the wife’s breakdown and the husband’s affair, the sister proposes they move into her ramshackle house in Pennsylvania. |
Dept. of Speculation — Jenny Offill (2014)
Source: Dept. Of Speculation.md · Readwise highlight
Her sister is the one who comes up with the winning plan. They should move to her ramshackle house in Pennsylvania and live there for next to nothing.
- Role: setting
- In the book: After the wife’s breakdown and the husband’s affair, the sister proposes they move into her ramshackle house in Pennsylvania. The family packs the car and goes, and the rest of the book unfolds there through fall and winter: the wife hides money, takes pills, writes in a little room, the daughter builds rock piles, they get a puppy and the husband buys a piano. The narration shifts to the first person (‘we’) in the final snow scene at the mailboxes and school bus.
- Why it matters: It is the book’s final setting and the place of partial repair, the counterweight to Brooklyn; the sky, stars and quiet recur as the marriage mends. The location is deliberately generic, so the pin is only an approximate region.
- Real vs. fictional: Real river and state; the house and town are unnamed and not identifiable from sources.
- Where is it?: ⚠️ best-guess. Clues in the text: “They moved to Pennsylvania to an old ramshackle house on the Delaware River.”; “They should move to her ramshackle house in Pennsylvania and live there for next to nothing.”; “They have told the daughter it will take four hours to get there.”; “People who have already moved to the country give warnings: Beware fracking. Check for ticks. Don’t get goats.”. Reference works: Wikipedia (Dept._of_Speculation) says only ‘not purely autobiographical’; no source found naming the town. Searches of interviews (Paris Review, Zyzzyva, White Review, NYRB) turned up no location. Chosen: Pennsylvania. Only the river and state are given, so the point is a representative one for the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware, upper stretch (fracking debate, rural, within day reach of Brooklyn). Alternatives: Delaware Water Gap / Monroe-Northampton Pennsylvania (closer to NYC); Delaware River near Easton or Bucks County (lower Delaware, not ‘country’ and far from fracking); Wayne County near Honesdale