The IR Bookshelf: What We're Reading
WEATHER by Jenny Offill
A Review by Nantanya Biskar
I read Jenny Offill’s new novel, Weather, about three months ago, before the scale and breadth of coronavirus had yet to reveal itself. The novel deals with a different kind of anticipatory dread, that of climate change, but its themes, psychology, and central conflict offer insight for our current difficult moment. Increasingly, the language of climate change and human-precipitated disaster is not gauged in terms of if, but in terms of when. We are now living through part of that when, and Weather, with its tender and intimate hopefulness, is far better than a wake-up call. It is too intelligent to be only a comfort, and too complex to be only a screed. It is a book that captures the ineffable, constant, daily struggle to live in a world we know to be dying. As Offill said in one interview, it is a book that dramatizes unblinding, a book that asks—with humor, with honesty, with dread—“Am I looking away from half the things I see?”
Those who have read Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation will find many points of comparison between the two. My experience of reading Dept. of Speculation was one of shocking, delighted recognition. I felt in Offill’s gorgeous and spare sentences, in her short and pointillistic paragraphs a companionable intelligence, and I devoured Dept. of Speculation in an evening, closing it with the sense that I had passed the time with a smart and funny friend. Weather feels bigger. In Dept. of Speculation, the forces pressuring the central relationship come largely from within—a challenging baby, work-life balance, the narrator’s struggles with anxiety—while in Weather, more of those forces come from without. Weather explores themes familiar from Speculation, and Offill retains her exhilarating honesty with regards to marriage, commitment, infidelity, child-rearing, and how life’s daily exigencies slowly alter the experience of love. But in the new novel, Offill also sets her sights on climate change, doomsday prepping, mental illness and addiction, and the particular existential sorrow of living in the face of assured destruction. How the characters in Weather respond to our current moment fuels both conflict and connection throughout the book.
It is one of the astonishing features of Offill’s novels that they are both radically succinct and also very difficult to summarize. Offill’s works feel less structured and more knitted, with strands of plot appearing, disappearing, and reemerging. This creates both a rich texture and a kind of music, a plot-rhythm as distinct as Offill’s sentences. Offill’s plots are not complex, but her presentation is, and that is a rather perfect metaphor for what Offill seeks to capture about a certain kind of modern experience of late-stage capitalism and globalization, which both render the most basic aspects of domestic life incredibly complex.
In Weather we meet Lizzie, who begins to work for her former academic mentor, Sylvia, answering emails from concerned listeners of Sylvia’s doomsday podcast. At the same time, Lizzie juggles challenges ranging from the temptation of an affair, to caring for her addict brother—who is also a new father—to choosing a site for a post-apocalypse homestead for her family. Lizzie grapples with caretaking on scales large and small, domestic and global. And here is one of the many ways the novel touches on the coronavirus pandemic. Offill manages to draw the dual-consciousness of domestic responsibilities and global consequences.
Offill has described Lizzie as a “porous” character, one who acts as a sieve for others’ troubles. Lizzie wants to care; often she is exhausted by it. She cares for her immediate family, as well as for more ancillary characters, such as Mr. Jimmy, who runs a dying car-ride service. In many ways, Lizzie’s relationship with Mr. Jimmy exemplifies the central conflict throughout the book: Lizzie feels obligated to continue to support Mr. Jimmy because his business is dying due to larger economic and social forces that neither of them can control, while at the same time Lizzie feels guilty for using a car service rather than public transportation. How are we to behave when we are acutely aware of the far-reaching consequences of our actions? How are we to care for each other in the face of imminent disaster? This pull between the intimate and the political, the small-scale and the large-scale, occupies Lizzie’s mental and emotional energies. Like many of us, Lizzie cannot stop thinking about the dying world, and how her efforts to tend the people she loves might mean nothing when the food runs out. In other hands, Lizzie’s psychology could easily slip into self-indulgence, overwrought emotionalism, or knowing performance. But Offill is a writer of subtleties: her language is achingly precise, incisive, and pared down, almost sculpted. Offill adroitly places the stress of PTA meetings alongside the stress of the world’s collapse in a way that validates and sharpens both experiences.
Weather is the rare book that we both want and need. At least, I wanted it, without knowing that I did until I was happily immersed in Offill’s voice, once again passing an evening with her congenial genius. Offill has pulled off something extraordinary: She has captured our present condition in which we recognize the likely futility of our everyday lives while we also hope that what we do will matter, that there will still be some kind of world to aim for, for each other. It is our very interconnectedness, Offill argues, that should compel us to try.