![]() And yet, in the years since I recorded that reaction, Dept. I once wrote that I thought this a great book. When a woman on the subway says the phrase “sleeping like a baby,” Offill wants “to scream for five hours in her ear.” The mordant nature of her observations kept you reading, the humor bent in service of a bite. That was a slow-moving disaster book, too, in its way: the chronicle of a woman feeling both strongly attached to a new baby and afraid that her attachment was getting in the way of her ambitions for herself. Weather is written entirely in short, aphoristic flashes like these, the same paragraph-long little parables that Offill deployed to rapturous acclaim in her previous book, 2014’s Dept. Old person worry: What if everything I do does? Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? “The one where my brother shows up to my apartment and says, Lizzie, can I die here?” There is an elegance even in her more depressing insights, like the following questions, offered early in the book, which I kept thinking about for days, going about my life: “Maybe I can stop having that dream now,” she’ll muse. ![]() She is full of anxiety, but she arrives at such a beautifully laconic mode of expression that the effect is lulling rather than unsettling. The narrator’s mood is, in a pleasing way, internally contradictory. ![]() ![]() That’s about all there is to say about the premise and plot-like most high-literary fiction of the 2010s, this novel is propelled by voice, not machinery. ![]()
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