Weather
A librarian in New York processes climate anxiety, personal chaos, and the state of the world in a mosaic of fragments, aphorisms, and overheard conversations. Offill's formal technique is perfect for the fragmented attention of living in crisis. The pandemic year's perfect pre-pandemic novel.
Weather runs thin on plot, a scatter of vignettes some readers find weightless rather than deliberate, and the same fragments fans praise strike detractors as material that “felt ephemeral, like scrolling through a twitter feed.” Several reviewers say the book fades fast: they “couldn't remember where I had left off,” and struggled afterward to keep the men in Lizzie's life straight by name. The sparse, undated staging leaves some readers lost, one writing it was “too sparse...no idea where the main character was.” And more than one review calls Lizzie's circle “these people are pretty far up their own backsides,” a comfortable orbit for a novel that gestures at planetary catastrophe.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
