Review: Weather by Jenny Offill

Weather by Jenny Offill

Weather – Jenny Offill (Granta, $32.99)
reviewed by Louise Ward, Wardini Books

Lizzie takes the world gently upon her shoulders in this beautifully rendered novel.

Her brain swirls with specific worries - what the world will look like for her small son come 2047, finding a place safer for her family than New York and her brother Henry's dangerously swinging states of mental health.

Lizzie is a librarian and over thinks the lives of her regulars – the girl with the bitten down fingernails, the university professor. She lives so much inside her head that she fails to notice large, ordinary things like the day her building's scaffolding is taken down after three years - her husband affectionately despairs.

She is also an unofficial shrink to the fans of her mentor, Sylvia, whose out there philosophical podcast has become so popular that she hires Lizzie to answer her emails. This doesn't help the over thinking.

Meanwhile Henry gets better and great things happen but then spirals in the fallout of a relationship. His thoughts are paranoid, his busy brain running away with itself and Lizzie takes him in, takes him on, to the detriment of other aspects of her life.

The narrative is distilled into short, sparse paragraphs punctuated by pauses, giving space for thought and absorption. Lizzie's tone is wry, sardonic, her observations incisive and the commentary familiar to liberal readers keenly following the many ills of their milieu.

This slim novel is a thoughtful treatise on everything - climate change, way out conspiracies, Trump and the concerns of the worried well. It is unexpectedly funny, the mocking tone admitting that we're all worried, the world is driving us all a bit mad, but we are indeed, all in the same boat.