Jenny Offill, _Weather_

NOT A SEQUEL to Dept of Speculation, but almost feels like one.The narrator, Lizzie, is a young(ish) married woman, one child, living in New York City, well-educated (ABD), who is piecing together a career in the literary-cultural sphere (university librarian, plus part-time work handling the e-mail correspondence of her former dissertation direction, a sort of female Bill-McKibben). The child in Weather is a son rather than a daughter, but in many ways we seem to be once again seeing the world through the eyes of "the wife" of Offill's previous novel.

Which is fine by me. What I loved about Dept of Speculation was the Wife's voice, and Lizzie's voice in Weather is its twin: vulnerable, sensitized, compassionate, having some tendencies to obsession, loving her child while also being somewhat in awe of her, drily funny, smart, observant. As in Dept of Speculation, the voice comes in small packets, "short swallow-flights" as Tennyson put it, dipping in and out, many sections not even a page long--as such, exactly the sort of polaroid flash-essay someone juggling the responsibilities of the Wife/Lizzie might just barely have enough time to write.

Weather has a little less plot than the Husband's infidelity created in Dept of Speculation, but it does have some. Will Lizzie have an affair with the charismatic war correspondent she met while her husband and son are on an extended visit to the west coast, a trip Lizzie did not make because she is looking after her brother, whose wife kicked him out after he lapsed from his recovery program? So there's all that.

But Weather is mainly about the voice, and what an addictive one it is.