Weather is a book written in short vignettes like a long poem in verse. That “A Novel” is part of the title seems almost a point of clarification, to assure the reader that this ephemeral narrative will meet the expectations of the genre.

A writer friend I know keeps a journal with detailed observations from her everyday life. This book reads like that journal, filled with delicious snippets of the overlooked and unexamined. The narrator works in a library and is privy to an ever-changing cast of characters who visit and work around her.

“Also in the air: a coworker who has taken to carrying X-rays around in her purse. Some kind of medical mistake. It can’t be undone, but it can be recounted.”

Interspersed with the vignettes are some very quirky jokes, not all of which I understood.

The story itself is told from the perspective of Lizzie Benson, and describes her life with her husband Ben (a philosophy PhD who makes money as a coder) and son Eli (whose New York public school drop offs each morning are an encounter with otherness). The book takes place just prior to the last presidential election, so the volatile political environment is background to the narrative. The changing Weather marked by the title is both environmental and political.

Lizzie has a very close relationship with her brother Henry, a recovering substance abuser who struggles with depression. Their relationship is endearing, including the little tricks Lizzie employs to support him and keep him alive from day to day.

In Weather, the future is uncertain; the war photographer comments on the nature of countries about to erupt in war (“hackles up”), the environmentalists say there is no where to relocate to keep your family safe in the inevitable climate catastrophe to come, Eli’s uncomfortable questions about death are diverted and unanswered. The counterpoint to this temporal anxiety seem to be the everyday acts of kindness and a present-focused living. A driver with a car service Lizzie uses is getting forced out of business by that “other company” so Lizzie starts taking his cars everywhere and wonders if she is his only client. Her mother buys socks for the homeless which she hands out with dollar bills. She takes in her brother after his marriage falls apart, and stays up late with him each night brainstorming greeting card ideas to distract him from the depression.

Just as this story resides very much in the present, the ending comes almost arbitrarily. At first I found this unsettling, but have come to understand this as consistent with Offill’s present-centered focus. Though short, the book covers a lot of ground and I would give it a 4.5 👍 out of 5👍.