Offill captures what it is like to fall in love, or to feel oppressed by a city, or to trade dreams of passionate art-making for the sometimes marvelous but often dull and occasionally deranging work of childrearing. In just a few artfully restrained paragraphs, Ms. of Speculation (TLS, June 27, 2014), Weather takes the form of short paragraphs, each beautifully shaped and self-contained, but the mood in these pages is more relaxed than in the previous book, despite the oppressive zeitgeist that overshadows them. Rereading this book, I couldn’t help but marvel at its elegance. The references-to Hesiod’s advice on choosing a mate, Thomas Edison’s theory of memory, Lebanese proverbs, early space travel-serve to heighten the text without seeming highfalutin. Though Offill draws inspiration from this kind of thinking, it would be a mistake to say that Weatherembraces nihilism as an antidote for existential despair (Cynicism is just a soft form of. As a similarly aging, similarly ambitious, similarly frustrated, similarly observant Brooklyn-based woman, I may have wondered (in that whiny voice reserved for personal questions of dubious injustice): Well, where is my acclaimed book?

And the book was so spare, more like a series of notes than a full-fledged novel, that I suppose I was jealous that Ms. Her takes and observations were keen, insightful and also familiar.

The book’s narrator-a Brooklyn-based wife and mother who grapples with the inevitable narrowing of life, with all of its attending gifts and disappointments-felt just so familiar. of Speculation,” Jenny Offill’s breakthrough 2014 novel, was mild resentment. It’s about trying to understand climate change and. T o be honest, the feeling I had when I first read “Dept. Jenny Offill’s Weather is a novel about living at the end of the world, which is to say that it is a novel about being alive right now.

Weather jenny offill review