something like an inverted X-ray: a narrative that illuminates not the obvious bones of the story but its unexpected details not the bold lines of your femurs but the detritus in your pockets - the crumpled receipts, the pacifier dropped on the sidewalk, the key whose lock you can’t remember. Offill’s whittled narrative bursts are apt vessels for the daily experience of scale-shifting they document - the vertigo of moving between the claustrophobia of domestic discontent and the impossibly vast horizon of global catastrophe. of Speculation than to Weather, it might be a testament to the narrative dilemma the new novel is reckoning with: the scale of its ambition, despite its brevity, in its attempt to tell a story about climate change that carries the same visceral force as our private emotional dramas - that is, in fact, inseparable from them. part of the brilliance of Offill’s fiction is how it pushes back against this self-deception.

Offill’s writing is shrewd on the question of whether intense psychic suffering heightens your awareness of the pain of others, or makes you blind to it. fragmented structure composed of short bursts of mundane intensity that make me think of Dalí’s animal sketches, in which a few spare ink strokes evoke the essence of each beast. Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do.

Weather by offill