Right after the Weather

June 15, 2019
In her early 40s, Cate is tired of low-paying theater gigs, handouts from her parents, and a furtive affair with Dana, who will never leave her live-in girlfriend. It's also annoying that she can't dislodge ex-husband Graham, just dumped by wife No. 3 from her spare bedroom and from his obsession with government surveillance--paranoia entirely justified, in his view, by Donald Trump's recent election. Still, Cate seems on her way to better things; she's dating well-heeled Maureen and lands a job designing an off-Broadway show for a high-powered writer-director team that could ratchet up her career. However, menacing interspersed sections voiced by Nathan, a sociopath living with drug addicted Irene, suggest danger ahead. It's quickly evident that their crash pad is somewhere near Cate's best friend Neale's house, and as Nathan's monologues grow increasingly creepier, we wait for a collision. Meanwhile, Anshaw (Carry the One, 2012, etc.) crafts an engaging narrative with her customary precision and tart humor: A blowsy, "recently pretty" character "appears to do most of her shopping at Renaissance fairs," and parking enforcement in Chicago, "once a lazy, city-run revenue effort, has been sold off to a ruthless corporation based somewhere in the Middle East...meter readers in Day-Glo vests troll relentlessly, ubiquitously." In a cast of richly drawn characters, Cate is foremost: oddly maladroit socially for a theater worker, madly in love with Graham's dog, Sailor, prone to imagining people's backstories (including the décor of their homes) in judgmental terms, but essentially kind. She's totally unprepared for the brutal confrontation that occurs halfway through the novel, but she forges ahead with her big opportunity in New York, just the way people do in real life. Anshaw never amps up her fiction with melodrama or neat conclusions, and she leaves her characters changed but by no means finished in an indeterminate yet satisfying finale. Another treat from the great Anshaw: sharply observed, unsentimentally compassionate, always cognizant of life's complexities.

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August 12, 2019
Anshaw (Carry the One) brings a fresh, keen voice to this story of modern lesbian life. In 2016 Chicago, 40-something Cate, a theater set designer, needs a boost in her low-level career. Her likable, wealthy, neurotic ex-husband Graham is temporarily living with her, despite their divorce many years before, when Cate had accepted that she was a lesbian. Cate tries to improve her unsatisfying life—and recover from the mortification of Trump winning the 2016 presidential election—by dating a seemingly ideal woman, a costume designer named Maureen, but Cate’s quirks and immaturity prevent her from convincing herself that she has found a just-right partner, or that she can achieve security in her profession. The narrative also features a thread involving two scruffy adults who stopped by for candy on Halloween and turn out to be addicts, and the narrative occasionally turns to brief vignettes of their lives with drugs and the homes they invade, adding suspense and culminating with a violent intersection of the two story lines. The danger of the addicts inspires the creative Cate, who has been surviving mostly on help from others, to grow up. Anshaw’s account of a woman seeking love as she struggles to make a living in her chosen profession will captivate readers.

Starred review from September 15, 2019
Anshaw's (Carry the One, 2012) compassionate novels are propelled by her preternatural gift for close observation, so it was a stroke of genius to create a hyper-attentive set-designer narrator. Not only does Cate take in every detail of every scene, she also has strong opinions about all that she surveys, making her inner monologue stingingly precise and often hilarious. She is slowly building a reputation in Chicago, primarily with gay-themed productions, and barely getting by. Now in her forties, Cate is trying to extract herself from her affair with Dana and convince herself to go all-in with costume designer Maureen, while her once-again divorced ex-husband holes up in her apartment and succumbs to deep conspiracy paranoia as Trump takes office. At least her ex's dog brings Cate bliss, and she cherishes her longtime friendship with yoga teacher Neale and her 12-year-son. But just when Cate gets her big break?a prestigious off-Broadway production of a play about Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, she arrives at Neale's place during a horrific home invasion and brutal attack. With sharply drawn characters, an ensnaring plot, and a look back at closeted gay lives, Anshaw, acutely attuned to the shifting weather of emotions and relationships, insightfully dramatizes the insistence of desire over convention and expediency and the endless reverberations of violence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)