Weather - Jenny Offill

Weather by Jenny Offill is another Women's Prize longlister (I'm reading as many as I can before the shortlist is announced!), and this one was not at all what I expected. The novel is short - about 200 pages - and Offill's writing definitely packs a punch. But is it a memorable book? In my opinion, not so much. I didn't dislike the book at all, in fact I rather liked it, but I'm already struggling to remember much about it despite only finishing it a couple of days ago. The protagonist is Lizzie Benson, who works as a librarian by day but is also a 'fake' shrink in her spare time. It is evident that she is overstretched and feels extremely responsible for the people around her, having taken care of her mother and addict brother for years - but this sense of duty means that she has increasingly less time to dedicate to her own husband and son. 

When Lizzie is hired by her old mentor Sylvia to answer fan mail sent in response to her podcast, she tries her best to keep everyone happy but is left increasingly mentally drained herself. She finds herself responding to listeners who are polar opposites politically, simultaneously trying to help and empathise with each, and is constantly being pulled in different directions, leaving her completely overwhelmed. Meanwhile, she is fearful about climate change (hence the title), and this only adds to the many burdens of her overly-busy life. Most of the action of this book is not actually witnessed by the reader - we only receive a second-hand commentary of events, and their implications. Offill has condensed the book into short lines and paragraphs so overall it feels extremely fleeting and somewhat dream-like. There's not much plot to the book but I think the author's intention was to comment more on how the domesticity of Lizzie's everyday life, however mundane, can still be extremely wearisome and stressful. 

The novel is choppy, sporadic and jumps around a lot, recounting snippets here and there - an unconventional structure, and not at all linear in its progression. I personally quite liked this style when reading, and can appreciate the subtlety of Offill's writing, however it's not easy to become invested in a book like this. We are given very little information about Lizzie, or the people around her for that matter, and the author leaves us to piece this together for ourselves. The pages are almost like diary entries, with jokes, anecdotes and media snippets thrown in to create a collage of her daily life. One reviewer wrote 'there is obviously a selection of things to be noted... but there are no conclusions or points to be made'. This is definitely the case as although there were moments of beauty, there was no overarching conclusion to be drawn from this book - although, I think that's quite what Offill intended.