Cate-who may seem hapless to some-perhaps merely lacks the insight to see that the artistic, if sometimes aimless, course of her life is actually a beautiful meander. Though its pacing is subtle, Anshaw is a deft writer and her details are insightful, intelligent, astute, and subtly humorous. But despite her best intentions, Cate cannot alter the course that fate has set her on. Anshaw’s meticulous attention to the quiet, inevitable impact of the assault on Cate’s life and her friendship with Neale’s gives Right after the Weather its main drive. Anshaw’s sentences are beautiful, and her characters are complex the plot builds towards a slow climax, which then falls into a slow spin and a somewhat abrupt finale. I mightn’t have thought so if not for the last paragraph, which, like a sudden break in the weather, astonishes with the force of its unexpected beauty. Perhaps, in its curiously bleak way, the novel means to nudge us toward some much-needed muddying. perhaps Anshaw means to shake us awake from our little narcissisms, our devout solipsisms, our daily applications of principled maquillage.
Wisely, Anshaw keeps the national politics mostly offstage, alluding to them just enough to lend a sense of proportion - not so much counterpoint as compass rose - to the fictional events she maps. Against this backdrop, what might otherwise have been a tale of petty strife and mildly amusing snark takes on deeper import. The novel takes place during the months leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election. does a very good - which is to say very uncomfortable - job of exploring the way our desire for connection and approval swims against the tide of our propensity to judge and feel judged by those who are close to us.
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