Weather

A Novel

By: Jenny Offill

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 3 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's Summary

Instant New York Times Best Seller

From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation - one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year - a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. 

As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience - but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks.... 

And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in - funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad. 

“Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun....” (The New York Times)

©2020 Jenny Offill (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

"Revelatory ... Offill, who will delight fans of Lydia Davis and Joy Williams, performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from 'tipping into the abyss.'" (Booklist)

 

"Always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel." (Publishers Weekly starred review)

"Clever and seductive...the 'weather' of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor. Offill is good company for the end of the world." (Kirkus Reviews starred review)

Read This Article Before Listening to Weather

I couldn't understand what the critics were raving about when I looked at this book in a local independent book store. None of the pages I read drew me into this novel. So I put it down and thought I would never return to it. That was until I read an article in the New York Times magazine by Parul Sehgal. The author spends time talking with Jenny Offill over many weeks, at her home, on long walks, observing together the art of Vija Celmins in a nearby museum. This article mirrors the beautiful subtly of Offill's writing process and prepares readers of Weather to open themselves to it. If you take the time to read Parul Sehgal's truly remarkable article, you will find yourself ready to step gently into Offill's experience of climate change.

More Short Story than Novel

I was not the greatest fan of this book. It sounded very interesting, and it started out promising. However, the further into it I got the more I realized the story structure didn’t agree with me. There are essentially two plot lines whose nexuses are the narrator and the fact climate change is happening. These could have been two distinct short stories. Combining them in this way made for a confusing listen. The story flips from one to another without warning. Having seen the printed book, the structure likely makes more sense in that format. All this said, the narration is top notch.

Probably Perfect for Most People

I’m don’t cuss and am pretty conservative so I didn’t like the use of the “F” word.

audio cutting out!!

Great book. is the audio cutting out for all of you? Every couple paragraphs the narrator misses a word --_--

Tedious, boring.

This is my least favorite novel I've finished in years. Offill does write beautiful sentences and can be funny and insightful in her descriptions, but I couldn't connect to anything in this narrative. It felt a lot like wasting hours on Facebook... A rambling unfocused shuffle of middle class, post-graduate types rambling on about drab problems. Fragments of climate change references, existential anxiety, vague political concern muffled by unchecked white privilege... blah... a total drag. I felt as bored and disappointed as the characters in the novel.

Who Cares?

This was billed as a novel about climate change. Yes there is one character who researches it. But this novel is the middle aged angst of an overeducated, underpaid mother. If that's what you want to read, it is perfect for you.

White noise

A philosophical conscious exploration of self. Normality disguised as insight. Nothing as a reflection of something; perhaps one truth.

story was mundane

This book was recommended as witty and insightful. The main character described herself as funny. I didn't find her funny or interesting. It may have been lost in translation from the performance aspect of delivery. The delivery was so monotone that it lacked the emphasis of emotion necessary for the expression of wit.

A random assortment of intellectual cliches

I will be frank. I did not like this book. Part of the problem is that I had just finished Anne Tyler's The Redhead by the side of the road. An excellent book; human-hearted in the best way; what a novel should be. Then I read Weather. There are no rounded, real humans in this book. The characters are all flat -- identified by ethnicity, or political opinions, or in some other way dragged from the daily newspapers. There is a sense of dread, which is given no heft, and at one point becomes the election of Trump. I do not think this is a book that will age well. Indeed, there is not much about the weather in the book either -- the main reason I read it at all was a New York Times review that emphasized the relationship between the book and climate change. It appears to me that the reviewer was mostly influenced in that regard by by the book's title, and by the vague dread throughout.

I myself felt dread upon reading this book. My fear is that we will see many more books like this. My fear is that characters, and humans, and feelings have for many writers receded into the background, to be superseded by political opinions and stances, ethnicity and race, intellectual fads from the authors' university years, and current events culled from the newspapers rather than personal experience.

Interesting book. Audible if you’re reading this, get more narrators.

I enjoyed the book but I have a really hard time with Cassandra Campbell’s narration. And Audible uses her SO MUCH. I’m sure she’s a lovely person but surely there can be more variety! It’s the bright clipped voice that seems inappropriate for some of these heavier books.