This power imparts a vivid significance to that person’s every word, glance, and gesture-a significance that, as “The Life of the Mind” portrays, reproduces phrases and ideas present in other intimate relationships, but remains wary of classifying this power as love. One moment, Judith’s eyes seem to have “fully spherical, panopticon-like mobility” the next, they are “the greedy straws” of a face that is “like a living organism that sucked the life out of your face in order to sustain itself.” Smallwood’s narrator understands how changeable our perceptions can be of a person who derives her power from a mingling of institutional authority and charismatic appeal. One moment, the therapist’s eyes are “looking vacantly” the next, they are “moving around all the time,” before they look “blankly” again. In the two scenes, these figures shadow one another, swapping places and roles, in a diptych that shows us what it might be like to experience, as Dorothy does, “adulthood as a simulacra of childhood.” There is an anxious Hitchcockian instability to the descriptions of both encounters. “But that same logic would dictate that Judith loved Dorothy,” Smallwood writes, “and that couldn’t be true.”
In the second, Dorothy is losing money in a casino when her former dissertation adviser, Judith, “a teacher and a foster mother and an employer,” drags her to a pool, past crowds of parents and children and a sign that “spelled LOVE in glittery red letters.” On the way, Judith snaps a photograph of Dorothy-“a good photo,” Dorothy thinks, by comparison to the unflattering photographs that her boyfriend takes, and which lead her to wonder if he loves her.
In the first, the protagonist, Dorothy, an adjunct professor of English literature, is attending a conference in Las Vegas, where she has a video session with her therapist: she talks “blandly,” about architecture and signage, air-conditioning and species death, before they move onto a conversation of notably unspecified length and tone about Dorothy’s mother.
At the center of “ The Life of the Mind” (2021), Christine Smallwood’s comic novel about the vagaries of contemporary academia, are two scenes designed to mirror each other.
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