If Lizzie is enmeshed with her brother, a former addict who will struggle with a new marriage and baby, there’s also a host of other characters caught in the mesh of her life. With its paradoxical meaning of both containing spaces and joining things together, ‘mesh’ could be used to describe the unusual form of this novel, which is written in short paragraphs, separated widely on the page, yielding a patchwork of Lizzie’s fragmentary thoughts and observations about life in contemporary New York, and the people caught up in it. The word ‘mesh’ returns a few pages later, in a podcast, referring to the interconnectedness of different species: ‘a better term than “web”, they think’. Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s impressive third novel Weather, is ‘enmeshed’ with her brother, according to her psychologist-cum-meditation teacher.
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