She plans to “rewild half the earth” and is supported by Silicon Valley billionaires who want to “de-extinct” mammoths. Sylvia has become a kind of celebrity through a podcast called Hell and High Water and is now on a “never-ending speaking tour”. Lizzie is contacted by a former university professor, Sylvia, who “used to check in on me sometimes to see if I was still squandering my promise”. Her brother, Henry, is in and out of Narcotics Anonymous, in a relationship with Catherine, “a weird mix of hard-edged and hippie-minded”. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, did a classics degree but now designs educational computer games her son, Eli, asks her difficult questions and at the school gates she can’t stop thinking about “how big this school is or how small he is”. Weather, Offill’s third novel, at first feels on familiar ground, telling the tale of Lizzie Benson, a mother and librarian in an unnamed New York borough who “used to have plans! Biggish ones, medium at least.” Lizzie attends meditation classes with a woman called Margot, although mostly “the people who take this meditation class just want to know if they should be vegetarians or, if they already are, how to convert others”.
0 kommentar(er)
