This third person narrative follows Dorothy, an adjunct professor a week into a miscarriage following an unviable pregnancy. Dorothy is out of sync with the people in her life, curling in a hard ball to avoid the caresses of her less-than-attentive boyfriend and routinely lying to her best friend. Her isolation is compounded by the fact she hasn’t told her therapist, mother, or best friend about her loss. The narrative recounts her failures in grad school in living up to her advisor’s expectations, and her jealousy triggered by a rival classmate’s success. The lingering events of her miscarriage and its subsequent doctor appointments are interwoven with humorous scenes: Dorothy goes to see second therapist to decide what to do about the first, she attends an underwater puppet show with her mother and her mother’s mentee made surrogate-daughter; she runs into an ex who used to whisper Frank O’Hara poems during sex. As the title indicates, most of the novel takes place in the mind of the narrator, and although Dorothy attends an academic conference where she comes face to face with her former advisor, readers should not expect much in the way of plot. Instead, this is a book about a perceptive mind at work. The many joys of the novel come in the narrator’s astute and humorous observations and careful and precise imagery. Smallwood is intelligent and funny, often cutting in her observations of daily life, and while it may seem that Dorothy does little more than go from one humiliating experience to another, The Life of The Mind is also a deeply moving reflection on failure, loss, and persistence.

Thanks to Netgalley and Hogarth for the early ebook. The first thing we learn about Dorthy, the narrator of this short, but sharp novel, is that she has two therapists. She has her original therapist and a second therapist that she’s seeing to make sure that the first therapist is doing her job correctly. An adjunct professor of English in NYC, Dorthy feels like her career is stalled. She also, more importantly, has just had a miscarriage that she’s not telling anyone about, not her mother, her two therapists or even Gaby, her best friend whose own life has gotten so much busier as she has had her first child. After a conference in Las Vegas where Dorthy runs into her peers and her mentor, she truly sees that her career is going nowhere. She comes home and attends a party thrown by Gaby only to find out that Gaby is pregnant once again. This is a fun novel with a tough sense of humor. You know you’re in trouble in life when you have so many people around you but you’d rather argue and talk to the imaginary people in your mind instead.