Weather
Author: Jenny Offill
Publisher: Knopf
View on Goodreads
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop,* which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
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.
TL;DR Review
Weather is not so much a story as a series of linked vignettes that, together, give us a glimpse into Lizzie’s life. I liked it, but it won’t be for everyone.
For you if: You have patience for and interest in books without plot; those written to examine humanity rather than to tell a story.
Full Review
I picked up Weather after seeing positive reviews from my friends who read a lot of literary fiction, and because it was shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize. I was even more intrigued when I read Jenny Offill’s bio and learned she teaches at Syracuse University, my home turf!
I should preface this by saying that in order to enjoy this book, you have to be okay with floating a little bit. There is almost no plot. Instead, the book is written in vignettes: snippets of things happening in the main character’s life, her observations about the world, anecdotes, etc. They jump around in time and don’t have a clear link, except that they are all from the main character. In that way, it’s pretty abstract and feels quite “literary.” Whether you like this book will depend on whether you like books like that.
The book’s narrator is named Lizzie. She’s a university librarian with a husband and a son, and a brother who’s a recovering addict. She’s also a friend of a woman named Sylvia who runs a famous podcast about environmentalism. The two main “events” of the book are that a) her brother has a baby and drops precipitously into a state of poor mental health, and b) Sylvia asks her to help with the podcast, primarily by answering letters of fans and skeptics.
All together, Lizzie’s vignettes form a unique and resonant commentary on the world today, including societal trends, parenthood, family ties, and more. But I can also understand that for those who read primarily for story (which is perfectly valid), this book might be frustrating.
I had read nearly half of it when I found myself unexpectedly stuck in the car one day, so I downloaded the audiobook version of this book from my library. It’s really short (200 pages), so that’s how I finished the book. And I found that the audiobook was actually really helpful — the voice narrator did a great job of bringing inflection and meaning into the vignettes, which helped to tie them together better than I could on my own. The resonated more, and I appreciated it more. It’s not a “casual” audiobook that you can listen to without fully concentrating — you definitely have to pay attention in order to really pick up on what the author is doing — which I know (from experience) can be hard. The car ride ended up being the perfect place for me to listen to it, but I might also suggest listening while walking or folding laundry.
Trigger Warnings
Drug addiction and abuse
*This is an affiliate link to Bookshop.org, an online alternative to buying books on Amazon. A portion of every sale goes directly to independent bookstores! When you buy a book using my link, I will also receive a small commission. Thank you for supporting indies. They need us.