At the breakfast table, Ben reads Lucretius, who in his own time diagnosed ‘Terrible fears one minute! Apathy the next!’ At the supermarket Eli asks who made all the fading things on the shelves, and Lizzie replies ‘the Invisible Hand’ – of capital, that is, which is evanescing and accelerating in the same instant. What is wrong with my knee?’ Now, in the wake of the 2016 US election (President Trump is never actually named) daily life is stalked by horror, soaked with panic. Lizzie knows the standard worries: ‘Here is the midnight question for my husband. Except we’re in the present, and the present has gone to hell.

With her mordant inner monologue about campus life, her equally disappointed husband Ben, and robot-obsessed son Eli, Lizzie has all the lineaments of the heroine from a conventional novel of middle-aged dread. It can’t be undone, but it can be recounted.’ There is a ‘doomed adjunct’, a nail-biting toilet paper thief, and an undergraduate with stern ambitions: ‘Failure is not an option.’ Lizzie’s employers provide a typology of library users: ‘Malodorous/Humming/Laughing/Defacing/Laundering/Combative/Chattering/Lonely/Coughing.’ Lonely you’d expect, but laundering?

Now Lizzie contends with fretful, garrulous colleagues like the woman who carries her own X-rays around all day: ‘Some kind of medical mistake. ‘All day long, cranky professors.’ In a previous life, she wrote half a dissertation: ‘“The Domestication of Death: Cross-cultural Mythologies” I was pleased to call it.’ But her academic career was run off the rails by her having to care for a drug-addicted brother, Henry. Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s drolly fractured third novel, Weather, is a university librarian in her forties.

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