Weather has a comparable thickness of atmosphere, though the anguish that suffuses the new book is as much public or political as it is private or personal. Offill said she was much less interested in plot than in the creation of a “sense of momentum, of emotional velocity”. The effect of the radically discontinuous structure of Dept of Speculation was to create what one critic called an “undertow of anguish”.
Her new novel Weather employs the same techniques as its predecessor (in the process evincing a similarly incantatory and lapidary quality), albeit to somewhat different ends. In an interview, Offill said she had sought a fresh form for that book (her 1999 debut novel Last Things was a more conventional exploration of marital turmoil), one that was influenced as much by poetry and the essay as it was by more standard fictional prose. This was a very unusual kind of domestic drama, arranged as a series of semi-discrete paragraphs and fragments of varying lengths, each of which hummed with a strange self-contained energy and power of its own. Offill’s trick in Dept of Speculation was to make the familiar - in this case, the novel of thwarted artistic ambition - unfamiliar.
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