Jenny Offil's WEATHER Predictably Unpredictable and Delightful

Jenny Offill's whimsical, profound, elating & depressing new novel WEATHER strikes the reader with thunderbolts of theological wisdom that render the reader the reader elevated or dismayed or both.  Whether or not you respond to Offill's humor, existential & mundane issues or philosophical quandaries with feelings of awe or doldrums, you will be quite smitten with torrential wit and quirkiness.  It can be argued Offill is writing an activistic novel warning about global warming.  The heroine, Lizzie, is both a librarian & ready reference to patrons.  She also serves as a ghost writer for Sylvia's podcast & emails.  Sylvia is a prominent environmentalist advocating changes to mitigate global warming.  Global warming as a key existential crisis in this novel is made crystal clear.  Lizzie's narrative is nebulous and acute.  The novel's loose structure flows from Lizzie's profound & mundane thoughts, her familial bonds and cogitations stemming from her meditation instructor, Margot.  Sylvia's podcast is Hell & High Water.  Sylvia also brings Lizzie along on her book tours to assist her which provide Lizzie a needed respite from the whirlwind of flagrant family matters.  Lizzie's marriage to Ben is teetering on dissension.  They have a young son Eli who provides precocious observations and puts Lizzie in some of the more hilarious situations trying to avoid the other mom's from Eli's class.  Lizzie family includes a drug addicted brother & sister-in-law about to have a baby and an elderly mother passive/aggressively vying to move in with her.  WEATHER is a breezy summer read with a galaxy of sparkling fragments of perceptive veracity.  Offill fills her novel with quotes from numerous mystic, theologians and gurus.  "Sri Ramakrishna said, 'Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond."  Lizzie lilts upon a cornucopia of arcane information.  Margot the mediation guru says to Lizzie & her class, "There was once a race of mythic arctic dwellers called the Hyperboreans. Their weather was mild, their trees bore fruit all year, and no one was ever sick.  But after a thousand years, they grew bored of this life.  They decked themselves in garlands and leaped off the cliffs into the sea.  What is the core delusion?  Margot asks the class, but nobody knows the right answer, and she doesn't bother to tell us."