For Your Reading List

Credit: Knopf, Emily Tobey

Like Jenny Offill’s previous novel Dept. of Speculation, a wryly, gutting little book about the end of a marriage (which also made our best of the decade list), Weather is a slim tome that packs in a lot of ideas — this time chiefly about the impending climate catastrophe. Lizzie, a university librarian and erstwhile graduate student, becomes more and more consumed with doomer-ism as she responds to fan mail for a friend’s apocalyptic podcast, watches over her brother who has an opioid addiction, and considers having an affair.

Structured in short paragraphs, the book is full of random trivia (there are six thousand miles of New York sewers and all of them lie well below sea level) and understated sentences that are darkly comic: “One morning a student tells me that failure is not an option and is angered when I laugh. I assume a cheerful manner. I tell her, Hey me too, I used to have plans! Biggish ones, medium at least.”

Offilll nails the feeling of unnamed dread, the small, seemingly futile attempts to make a difference, whether it’s taking the slower more expensive car service to help the guy who’s been decimated by rival start ups, or attending an activist meeting in the basement of a church. Lizzie’s perspective is a somewhat narrow, blinkered view that will likely resonate most with readers who are also middle class and white, but nevertheless Weather makes for reading that really captures the feeling of our current cultural and political moment in a blessedly unpretentious way. Get your copy now. —Tomi Obaro

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