Weather; it’s a clever name for a novel about one woman’s daily battle to stay sane and upright in the face of swirling storms, dark clouds, and killer lightning (only some of them metaphorical). Every aspect of librarian Lizzie’s world is under threat; her health, her food supply, her access to medicine, her marriage, her son’s future, her requirement to fill a hole in someone else’s life. And there are times during Jenny Offill’s new novel when it reads almost oppressively, like the blackest of blackhole comedies. But like a great, wry Ali Smith novel, or that exquisite bookshop scene in Annie Hall (“you only gave me books with death in the title”), it’s that second part of the equation that keeps it gleefully alive; this paranoid wreck of a…
