Weather
Jenny Offill, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385351102
Summary
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 hilarious and 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.
Sylvia has 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Massachusetts, USA
• Education—University of North Carolina-Chapel HIll
• Currently—New York, New York
Jenny Offill is an American author of three novels. Her first, Last Things (1999), was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L.A Times First Book Award. Dept. of Speculation (2014), Ofill's second novel, received highly favorably reviews, as has her third, Weather published in (2020).
Offill is also the co-editor with Elissa Schappell of two anthologies of essays and is the author of several children's books. She has taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Columbia University and Queens University.[ She currently resides as the Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/24/2020.)
Book Reviews
Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic—the tensions between self-involvement and social engagement—and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do. Weather is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis, what it means for a woman to be all of these things: a mother packing her son's backpack and putting away the dog's "slobber frog," a sister helping her recovering-addict brother take care of his infant daughter, and a citizen of a possibly doomed planet that might be a very different place for the son whose backpack she is packing, when he packs his own son's backpack decades from now, or certainly when that someday-son does the same for his own children.
Leslie Jamison - New York Times Book Review
[M]elancholy and satirical…Offill has genuine gifts as a comic novelist. Weather is her most soulful book, as well…. Offill's humor is saving humor; it's as if she's splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible…utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence…luminous.
Boston Globe
Genius…. [A] lapidary masterwork…. Remarkable and resonant…. The right novel for the end of the world.
Los Angeles Times
(Starred review) A librarian becomes increasingly obsessed with doomsday preparations…. Lizzie’s apocalyptic worries are bittersweet, but also always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel.
Publishers Weekly
Lizzie Benson, a librarian…[is] barely able to spend time with her husband and son as she fusses over her devout mother and addict brother…. [E]ventually Lizzie must look to the larger world and recognize that she can't save everyone—though she keeps trying.
Library Journal
Another crisply revelatory portrait of a marriage and family in flux…. Offill…performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from "tipping into the abyss."
Booklist
(Starred review) [C]lever and seductive…. The tension between mundane daily concerns and looming apocalypse, the "weather" of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor.
Kirkus Reviews
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