But she also fears climate change, environmental collapse, social disorder, and Donald Trump. Lizzie navigates some relatably mundane fears: of leaving her son, Eli, in a huge, crowded school of feeling inferior to wealthier, better-prepared parents of neglecting her talents and ambitions of aging, feeling that time itself is speeding up. Weather is, in a broad sense, a book about how to live (how to be a spouse, a parent, a sibling) and especially about how to live with fear.

Lizzie also looks after her brother Henry, a recovering addict. of Speculation, he is promoted to Ben, a classicist-cum-video game designer, in Weather. The women at the center of both books live in Brooklyn with a winningly precocious child and a cipher of a spouse - called only “the husband” in Dept. Where Dept.’s unnamed narrator was a novelist and professor saddled with a side job ghostwriting a wealthy man’s history of the space program, Weather’s Lizzie is a university librarian with a gig answering listener emails for her mentor’s podcast about ecological catastrophe, Hell or High Water. of Speculation’s fragmentary, epigrammatic form. Offill’s new novel, Weather, returns to Dept. of Speculation says that all we retain of a relationship are our memories: the good ones, the bad ones, and a handful of cryptically significant in-betweens. This form is tailored to the book’s content, a brief history of a marriage from its beginning to its near-ending as a result of the husband’s infidelity. It comprises dozens of short blocks of text, the longest a few pages, the shortest no longer than the message in a fortune cookie. Jenny Offill’s debut, Last Things, appeared two decades ago, but her breakout book was 2014’s Dept.

Weather offill review