Weather by Jenny Offill: book review
Weather by Jenny Offill
Overview: Lizzie's life is tethered to many different people. She has her family with Ben and her young son Eli. She supports her mom both financially and through phone therapy sessions. Her brother, Henry, feels like an even bigger responsibility as one person in her life characterizes them as "enmeshed" as Lizzie tries to help him through his sobriety and drug relapses. Lizzie never finished grad school or her dissertation. She's somewhat haunted by the idea that she never did make it big, her life didn't follow the expected arc. Now, she works in the university library and answers fan emails for the podcast her old advisor runs. This is a difficult book to write a plot summary for since there's very little plot. This is slice of life in its purest form. Overall: 4.5
Characters: 4 Lizzie sacrifices a lot of herself for others, and because she's pulled in so many directions, she can't fully satisfy any of her obligation without someone ultimately feeling let down. Her voice is undeniably great, and she has many funny observations about parenting and aging and living in New York. The way she sees the world is fascinating, and that's what this book rides on.
While there are the people that populate Lizzie's life that play a recurring role, it's also interesting to experience the details of the people that Lizzie sees in passing. Even the "extras" have unique details she pulls out about them which creates a richness within her relatively narrow world.
Plot: 4 There is truly no plot. If you're looking for plot, find another book. Sometimes, that's disastrous. This book does it with intention and with such strong writing that it works super well if you're into character studies. The main trajectory of the story is really Lizzie's mental state somewhat devolving with Trump getting elected and her awareness of the impending climate disaster becoming more acute through her work with her former mentor. (If you haven't guessed, this book is set in 2016.) Lizzie flirts with prepper tendencies, and that weight of impending doom, as well as carrying the other's emotions and problems, pulls her down. There's a slow unraveling that isn't completed by the time the book closes. The undeniable shift in America after the election directly manifests in a noticeable personal change. But it does largely feel arbitrary where we start and where we end up in the novel.
Writing: 5 I love Jenny Offill's writing, which I likely could have predicted by seeing that there are blurbs by Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner (though I haven't read their work yet, I know they've been cited as major influences by many authors including Sally Rooney). The first person prose is incredible, and the voice is electric. It grabbed me from the first page, even though I felt a bit disoriented in where I was in the story. The book is told in these vignettes that build a portrait of Lizzie's life. I finished the book in a few hours because it's short but it's also propulsive. Each scene is fascinating in its own right, and even if it doesn't immediately link to the next, the intrigue of the observations with these scenes made me want to read the next one. The quick pacing keeps it afloat even without a driving plot to buoy it.
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