Her side job answering doomsday emails from listeners of her former professor's podcast on climate change doesn't help. Reminiscent of Helen Ellis's off-the-wall American Housewife and Lydia Davis' micro-stories, Offill knows how to wield wit and paragraph breaks for maximum impact.īook Reviews 'Speculation' Shows Good Stories Come In Small Packages, Tooīut Lizzie - and our times - are not wired for glorious reassurance. The novel's narrator, Lizzie Benson, has a sardonic voice and a way with punchlines. This potent, appealing little book is about how we weather this sense of doom - with humor, incredulity, panic, disaster preparedness, or, best of all, action. Offill astutely compares the "hum in the air" to the one that followed 9/11. Offill's signature achievement here is to capture the angst specific to our particular moment in time - the rising tide of anxiety, especially in New York City, about a world threatened by climate change and the ascension of right-wing strongmen, which deepens after the 2016 election. While marriage and motherhood remain on the radar, Weather swirls around amber waves of dread. Offill's new novel, Weather, takes a similarly clever diary-like tack, but it's even better - darkly funny and urgent, yet more outwardly focused, fueled by a growing preoccupation with the scary prospect of a doomed earth. of Speculation (2014), a wonderful series of witty, plangent short dispatches about marriage, motherhood, and thwarted aspirations from an unnamed female writer whose life ventures dangerously close to the brink. Jenny Offill broke through the funk of a 15-year gap between her first and second novels with Dept. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.
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