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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/10/weather-jenny-offill-review A restless librarian is an insightful narrator of the climate crisis and political upheaval in the US Emotional truth is the currency of fiction. Jenny Offill’s last novel, Dept of Speculation, was a wry, caustic, funny book about motherhood and marriage written in a series of sharp, intimate, obliquely connected paragraphs. These paragraphs didn’t tell a story as such, but rather they worked upon the reader in an accretive and insidious fashion, building up a complex three-dimensional picture of the unnamed narrator’s existence, caught between her maternal instincts and her dreams of being an “art monster”. Dept of Speculation played with the reader’s expectations of the form, managing to be at once coyly withholding and painfully honest, overtly fictional but also gesturing towards the conventions of autobiography. Weather, Offill’s third novel, at first feels on familiar ground, telling the tale of Lizzie Benson, a mother and librarian in an unnamed New York borough who “used to have plans! Biggish ones, medium at least.” Lizzie attends meditation classes with a woman called Margot, although mostly “the people who take this meditation class just want to know if they should be vegetarians or, if they already are, how to convert others”. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, did a classics degree but now designs educational computer games; her son, Eli, asks her difficult questions and at the school gates she can’t stop thinking about “how big this school is or how small he is”. Her brother, Henry, is in and out of Narcotics Anonymous, in a relationship with Catherine, “a weird mix of hard-edged and hippie-minded”. Continue reading...
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