Lizzie’s late-night Internet sessions and teetering finances have taught her to anticipate the many ways in which she-and the world-can fall apart.

This is, at least, the perspective of the novel’s narrator, Lizzie, a grad-school dropout living at the frontier of gentrifying Brooklyn. Rather than zoom in on a single disorienting upheaval in a character’s life, the novel endeavors to show how, these days, every aspect of everyone’s life feels threatened, and how every decision seems to presage a duel between individual survival and collective action.Ī compromise: when the time comes, choose individual survival but feel very bad about it. The most recent in a string of novels that wonder whether we’re living in “unprecedented times,” “Weather” is Offill’s attempt to “write atmospherically,” she told Publishers Weekly. of Speculation” concerned the imminent dissolution of the narrator’s marriage, “Weather” takes place around the 2016 Presidential election, and so concerns the imminent dissolution of everything else. Both books generate their energy from dread, but, where “Dept. The couple does stay together, a happy-enough ending that seems fairly incredible in light of Offill’s new novel, “ Weather,” which contains no suggestion that the future’s uncertainty could be a good or exciting thing-the birds are running out of places to go. of Speculation-“She is after all, speculating”-proposing that they leave New York, move to the country, and, implicitly, save their marriage. Whether the couple will stay together is a distressingly live question when the protagonist decides to send her husband another letter from the Dept. Years later, they both still have the letters, but the husband has begun sleeping with a young woman from his office, and the joke that once implied young love’s cautious optimism has acquired a darker cast. “The return address was always the same: Dept. “They used to send each other letters,” Offill writes. of Speculation,” from 2014, refers to an old joke between the book’s unnamed protagonist and her husband. The title of Jenny Offill’s celebrated novel “ Dept.

Weather by Jenny Offill