Like water at the exact temperature of the human body, it can be hard to tell when you’re in Offill’s fiction and when you’re not. But Lizzie can’t risk leaving her brother alone the two of them once clung together during some unspecified childhood disaster, and early habits acquired as a matter of survival run deep. Henry washes up on Lizzie’s sofa, where he gets on her husband’s nerves, yells at their son for waking him up in the morning, loses the remote, and drinks all the milk. “I remind myself (as I often do),” Lizzie notes, “never to become so addicted to drugs or alcohol that I’m not allowed to use them.” If Weather has a central conflict (and that’s debatable), it’s the teetering psyche of this brother, who freaks out and wrecks his marriage when his new wife gives birth to their daughter. When Lizzie, the narrator of Weather, meets up with Henry, her anxious brother, she wishes she could “give him something for his nerves,” but because he’s clinging to a fragile sobriety, she can’t. Offill’s preferred structure might sound lackadaisical, but the lapidary funniness of many of her sentences indicates how precisely she calibrates them. of Speculation, except that I’d liked it very much. This made me feel less bad about remembering next to nothing of Offill’s previous novel, 2014’s reputation-making Dept. The first time I finished Jenny Offill’s new novel, Weather, I immediately went back to the beginning to read it again, partly because I’d found it enjoyable-charmingly wry after the fashion of Lorrie Moore-but also because the particulars of Weather had already slipped from my mind so fluidly. It’s a Hoot.Ī Q&A With the Author Whose Book Is Rocketing up the Charts Thanks to a Tweet From “Bigolas Dickolas”

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