Jenny Offill’s third novel, Weather, is a relatively small book with a large impact. It tells the story of Lizzie who is a wife and mother, a caretaker for her brother who has struggled with addiction, and a librarian by luck, not by training. She spends her days observing patrons of the library and analysing their lives, while juggling her own life issues at the same time. When a former mentor approaches Lizzie to take on a side job answering mail for her famous end-of-days-focused podcast –mail which comes from people termed as either “crazy or depressed” — things begin to get a bit weird.
As Lizzie spends more and more time researching survival skills and answering questions from the podcast fans, her brother’s mental health begins to deteriorate. And as these influences, both immediate and afar, slide toward the more bizarre, Lizzie’s grip on reality begins to shift as well. Her thoughts become more intrusive, more focused on preparing for the inevitable apocalypse, in whatever form it may take … perhaps as a means of attempting to exert control over the uncontrollable in her own life. She becomes more removed from her family and daily routine, beginning to spiral herself in such a beautifully subtle manner that the reader does not even realise it is happening at first.
Offill’s ability to layer meaning is on full display in this novel. Nothing is exactly as it reads, nuance underlies nearly every carefully crafted line. She examines issues of self, such as how we seek fulfilment in our lives. The uncertainty with which we view ourselves — what defines us, what choices we have made to bring us to this point, and where we go from here – and how this changes as we make our way through life. The value that is placed on us, especially as women, and the relationship of that value to others. She explores the concept of family, including how we pair together and the challenges families face as they grow and change over time. Perhaps most prescient, however, is Offill’s scathing, often farcical, observation and probing of society at large. She considers the current culture of the nation, the concept of privilege, and the onslaught of technology. She pokes at how these things have changed over time and how they have changed us, prods at the idea that we must move and adapt with the times to survive.
The most remarkable aspect of this book to me is the structure, which echoes that of the author’s highly regarded second novel Dept. of Speculation. Offill relays the story primarily in brief chunks, short paragraphs, that are punctuated by tightly woven sentences. In this way, each scene is given weight and meaning, one building upon the next as the story unfolds. It is unique and enthralling, the perfect format for a story which could not be told any other way.
Weather is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of February 11th 2020. My sincere thanks to A.A. Knopf for gifting me this galley. Mark this one down, it is definitely worth a read!
Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award), and Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award and the International Dublin Award. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.
Will you be picking up Weather? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
From the author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation–one of the New York Times Book Review‘s Ten Best Books of the Year–a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She’s become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you’ve seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience–but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she’s learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in–funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
