“Aw, c’mon, man,” she thinks, after repeating that she will have to let go of everything and everyone she loves. She keeps coming up short at the idea that death is inevitable, and not just her own, but also her family’s. She intermittently attends church services and Zen meditation classes, but they terrify her. “Voted, that we are the saints,” Lizzie thinks again on July Fourth. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark The epigraph, taken from minutes from a Connecticut town meeting in 1640, reads, “Voted, that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof voted, that the earth is given to the Saints voted, that we are the Saints.”

The idea of being “mostly enlightened” is central to Weather, which wrestles elliptically with religion. It goes on from there, leaving us to find our way around. “In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in,” Weather begins, referring to a Zen teacher who visits Lizzie’s library. We enter each one without context, half-blind. Offill tells Lizzie’s story in a series of discrete units that are less like fragments than they are like a series of river pebbles: polished to a diamond brilliance, with no sharp edges. She jokes comfortably with her husband, Ben, about leaving him.

When she ’s not working, Lizzie tends to her small son, Eli, who is attending a giant new school that Lizzie frets is “not on the human scale.” She also helps her recovering addict brother, Henry, tend to his newborn daughter. Lizzie’s job is to answer letters from terrified listeners. For extra money, she also works as an assistant for her old thesis adviser, who runs an environmental podcast called Hell or High Water.

Weather is narrated by Lizzie, a former PhD student who dropped out halfway through writing her dissertation now she works at her former university’s library. It’s about trying to understand climate change and motherhood - concepts so big that the mind can’t quite look at them dead on - by looking at them slantwise, through the smallest possible unit of thought. 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 by Jenny Offill