BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’ Is Emotional, Planetary and Very Turbulent
WEATHER
By Jenny Offill
When the narrator of Jenny Offill’s critically acclaimed and rightfully adored 2014 novel “Dept. of Speculation” discovers that her husband has been listening to a lecture series called “The Long Now,” she initially assumes these lectures are about “the feeling of daily life,” but eventually she realizes they concern “topics such as Climate Change and Peak Oil.” Her assumption and its wry correction gesture toward a familiar binary — between the implicit solipsism of caring mostly about “the feeling of daily life” and the more enlightened social consciousness of caring about capital-letter Issues.
But Lizzie, the narrator of Offill’s new novel, “Weather,” cares about both. Preoccupied by the apocalyptic horizon of climate change, the dark pulsing terror at the center of the novel, and by the “feeling of daily life,” Lizzie understands — or at least, enacts — the truth that we inhabit multiple scales of experience at the same time: from the minutiae of school drop-offs and P.T.A. activism to the frictions of our personal relationships all the way to the geological immensity of our (not so slowly) corroding planet. Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic — the tensions between self-involvement and social engagement — and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do.
“Weather” is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis, what it means for a woman to be all of these things: a mother packing her son’s backpack and putting away the dog’s “slobber frog,” a sister helping her recovering-addict brother take care of his infant daughter, and a citizen of a possibly doomed planet that might be a very different place for the son whose backpack she is packing, when he packs his own son’s backpack decades from now, or certainly when that someday-son does the same for his own children.
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| Emily Tobey |
Early in the book, Lizzie listens to a podcast called “The Center Cannot Hold,” hosted by her former academic mentor, a public intellectual named Sylvia, who tours the country lecturing about climate change. After hearing all about “the invisible horsemen galloping toward us,” Lizzie arrives home to “bills and supermarket fliers,” to a son who needs rubber cement peeled off his hands so he can keep playing Minecraft — so he can keep building this imagined world, even as another world is ending. “Of course, the world continues to end,” Sylvia tells Lizzie near the end of the book. Then she “gets off the phone to water her garden.” Her farewell brings to mind the ironic closing words of Voltaire’s “Candide”: “All that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden.”
Plot summary isn’t a particularly effective way to evoke the singular experience of reading Offill’s fiction, whose fragmented structure — composed of short bursts of mundane intensity that make me think of Dalí’s animal sketches, in which a few spare ink strokes evoke the essence of each beast — is often less concerned with dramatic, watershed events than with quotidian moments. (“For me, people’s emotional life is plot,” she has said.) But “Weather” is about a Brooklyn wife and mother — a Ph.D. dropout turned university librarian — who takes a job answering the flood of letters responding to Sylvia’s climate change podcast, and who spends most of her remaining time helping her brother figure out how to be a father to his baby girl. (Again: world ending, world beginning.)
“Weather” offers an elaborate taxonomy of various forms of caregiving: from the long-term intimacy of marriage (after her husband realizes that Lizzie has worn his long johns to bed, they make up a proverb together: “Married sex is like taking off your own pants”) to the sublime daily grit of motherhood and the desperate late-night phone calls and humdrum daylight work of saving an addict from his self-destructive impulses: “Get them to commit to the next day, the next hour, the next minute even.”
Offill’s writing is shrewd on the question of whether intense psychic suffering heightens your awareness of the pain of others, or makes you blind to it. The answer, of course, is that it can do both; that it inevitably does both. Sometimes Offill’s narrators seem vulnerable to the delusion that their dysfunction sets them apart — that they are breaking down against the backdrop of others’ composure, which can come across as self-deprecation but is actually its own form of egotism. But part of the brilliance of Offill’s fiction is how it pushes back against this self-deception: “Stay, just stay,” the wife in “Dept. of Speculation” tells her suicidal student, a girl overcome by pain of her own; while Lizzie’s meditation teacher, who believes in reincarnation, insists that “everyone here has done everything to everyone else.” Lizzie is often overwhelmed by her interior landscape, but she is also often aware that everyone around her inhabits an interior landscape that feels just as intense; and that they are all inhabiting an exterior landscape with intensities of its own.
Near the end of the novel, Lizzie reads about a group of cloistered monks who say, “We have died and we are in love with everything.” “Weather” understands that we can still be in love with what happens on a dying planet, and that life is always many things at once — full of love, full of despair, full of slobber frogs and melting glaciers and babies who won’t nap; that what happens on one scale doesn’t negate the others. But democratizing these scales can also become an alibi for complacency — for allowing us to shift back into the daily, the private, the emotional, as crutch or buffer. “Weather” suggests the comfort and peril of that retreat by narrating the life of a woman for whom retreat is becoming impossible. What happens when the horror of climate change gets lodged so deep under our skin we can’t escape it any longer? What happens when an author manages to translate this horror from an abstraction to a gripping tale of immediate particulars?
Walking away from her son’s elementary school one morning, Lizzie thinks: “The problem with Eli’s school is it’s not on a human scale.” The same could be said of writing about climate change: The subject isn’t on a human scale. Our minds can reckon with it, but how do we ask our child-size human hearts to hold it — to be productively overwhelmed by it? If I responded more strongly to “Dept. of Speculation” than to “Weather,” it might be a testament to the narrative dilemma the new novel is reckoning with: the scale of its ambition, despite its brevity, in its attempt to tell a story about climate change that carries the same visceral force as our private emotional dramas — that is, in fact, inseparable from them. It’s quite possible I’m just as much a solipsist as the “red-faced man” in the novel who listens to a lecture about melting glaciers and then asks, “But what’s going to happen to the American weather?”
Yet I think the intensity gap might also have to do with the way internal dangers allow for richer narrative tension than external ones: A marriage collapses from the inside, while the weather is external. It’s a deeper gut-punch when the call is coming from inside the house. The same is true for climate change. We’ve made the call. We are the threat. But the antagonism feels faceless and less psychologically complex than the domestic torment of intimate betrayal, and the vexed hope of rebuilding.
Offill’s whittled narrative bursts are apt vessels for the daily experience of scale-shifting they document — the vertigo of moving between the claustrophobia of domestic discontent and the impossibly vast horizon of global catastrophe. This fragmented form is weirdly well-suited to both melodrama and plotlessness: In “Dept. of Speculation,” it allowed Offill to narrate marital infidelity, which can easily verge into soap opera, with an oblique, devastating grace — its searing shards summoning the sensation of holding a hot saucepan for just a moment, before it burns the skin off your fingers. Offill’s agent once described that book as an X-ray rather than a novel, but in “Weather” we have something like an inverted X-ray: a narrative that illuminates not the obvious bones of the story but its unexpected details; not the bold lines of your femurs but the detritus in your pockets — the crumpled receipts, the pacifier dropped on the sidewalk, the key whose lock you can’t remember. These bits and bobs highlight “the feeling of daily life,” but their mundane silhouettes are backlit by something more like a nuclear explosion.
In both novels, Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun. In “Dept. of Speculation,” that white-hot core was the heartbreak of domestic collapse. In “Weather,” the collapse exists on a scale at once broader and more abstract: the end of the world itself. The thing that cannot be stared at directly is not the sun, but our own doomed planet.
Leslie Jamison is the author, most recently, of “Make It Scream, Make It Burn,” a collection of essays.
WEATHER
By Jenny Offill
207 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.
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