My Amazon and Goodreads review of Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill (Rating 3) – Reader Interest as Unsustainable as the Planet. Weather, a novel by Jenny Offill, is as satisfying as twee appetizers without a main course. In other words, not at all nourishing. Lizzie is a happily married woman with a well-adjusted young son and a brother who struggles with addiction, although not in crisis mode. Having dropped out of graduate school, she works in a university library and assists a former professor obsessed with climate change. Nothing changes for Lizzie. She has momentary twinges of fear about how to prepare for ecological disaster, but her life remains inert. The existential dread isn’t even very dreadful. Perhaps that’s the book’s message, that we fret yet do nothing. But as packaged in a somewhat random assortment of social-media length blurbs, the readers’ interest is no more sustainable than the planet. This quippy style seems to be a trend in recent fiction. It’s no longer experimental, and in the case of Weather, not even very imaginative. As an author myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), who prefers books with well developed characters and engaging narratives, I worry that writers and readers like me are doomed to extinction.
