Sharp as all this is ('Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Last year, I got one as a Christmas present.' She sums up how their lives differ in a few words. Vera licked his stamps for him.' The closest she gets to being an art monster is to ghostwrite a memoir for a businessman who almost became an astronaut. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. 'Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. 'What did you do today, you'd say when you got home from work and I'd try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.' We learn that she never intended to be a mother, nor a wife: she wanted to be an art monster. Offill is particularly strong on the strangeness of parenthood, as a time when the years roar by but the days within them can drag. Her mother tells her to 'whack' her choking baby on the back – choking on what? – 'and I do until the leaf, green, still beautiful, comes out in my hand'.

Elsewhere, we learn details only as she does, giving moments of surprise and joy. Because they come to the woman's mind unbidden, they are often stripped of context, making the reader work to find out what is happening. Jenny Offill can keep it up: almost every one of these vignettes is interesting and perfectly put. There is a risk in charming the reader early on like this – unless you can keep it up. On the way to the diner, he apologised for never really loving me. 'He seemed to have come all the way from San Francisco just to have coffee. She describes how an ex-boyfriend appears on her doorstep. They are like your cleverest friend's Facebook updates. Little people, Edison called them.' Her thoughts and recollections have an aphoristic neatness to them, enhanced by the way each paragraph is set alone on the page, white space above and below. 'Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. 'Memories are microscopic,' the woman says. The story is told in fragments, like memories that float in when you're trying to think about other things. There aren't many characters, and no one is named: there is the husband, their daughter and a few acquaintances.

From the point of view of an unnamed American woman, it gives us the hurrahs and boos of daily life, of marriage and of parenthood, with exceptional originality, intensity and sweetness. Dept. of Speculation is a riposte to the notion that domestic fiction is humdrum and unambitious. Fifteen years later, this is her second, and it was worth the wait. But contradictions are what you might expect from an author whose first novel was called Last Things.

A book this sad shouldn't be so much fun to read.

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