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Weather by Jenny Offill review – wit for the end times

Jenny Offill ‘shows us what we are selfishly ignoring’. Photograph: Christopher Lane

Weather by Jenny Offill review – wit for the end times

The follow-up to Dept. of Speculation is a dazzling response to climate crisis and political anxiety

Kate Clanchy
Thu 13 Feb 2020 09.00 GMT

In 2014, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation was greeted as a new sort of writing. Like Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Karl Ove Knausgård’s Boyhood, published in English in the same year, this was autofiction: a novel that blurred the boundaries with memoir. Unlike Cusk’s inquiry into other people’s stories or Knausgård’s famously expansive recollections, though, Offill’s book was dramatically pared down to taut, tight paragraphs trapped in the present tense, each packed with quirky observation and fantastic one liners. It was sold as “not so much a novel as the X-ray of one”. Six years later, Knausgård and Cusk have finished their sequences of novels; autofiction is so well established that it is being attacked for its solipsism; and Offill has finally sculpted another book, this time in even shorter paragraphs. Weather is barely novella-length and opens: “In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. ‘Bucket of black paint’ it means.”

Which should be a hopelessly cryptic way to start a novel, but social media has educated us since 2014. We now know how to read a few sparse details in a 280-character paragraph and put them together: this reads rather like a tweet, something a clever, deadpan literary person might punt out of a morning to give us all a laugh and a shiver of fond recognition. Offill’s protagonist swiftly moves on to more witty noticing of her peers: “Last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you’re doing right now making money?” And a bit of self-deprecation: “I wish you were a real shrink, my husband said, then we’d be rich.”

The narrator of Weather adopts a hapless, helpless stance in the face of the onslaught of modern life. She is Lizzie Benson, a librarian on a university campus, married to a man who once had other ambitions but now works in IT. Their marriage is the subject of more endearing smart observation: “‘I can only imagine what it would be like to be this age and in love,’ I tell Ben. ‘You are in love,’ he corrects me.” They have a single child who attends the “specially bright” programme – but is it special enough? – at the local mixed school.

Lizzie seems to have dropped out of a creative writing degree at some point, but she knows how to make characters, backstories and even plot emerge surprisingly smoothly from her stream of honed observations. She is not solipsistic: she has too many people to care for. Here is her mother, calling to tell her “about the light, the vine, the living bread”, but also to reveal the horrors of the decaying US health service and the consequences of unprotected old age in late capitalism. There and everywhere is the drug-addicted brother with whom Lizzie’s therapist says Lizzie is “enmeshed”, and his poignant journey through rehab and rapid marriage and family-making with Catherine, a woman who, the moment you tell her about a problem, “begins to act and she does not stop acting until the problem is solved”. And here, worrying about her child and her teeth, is Lizzie herself, whose frustrations and understated oppression we come to know and share. Like all relationships, the novel flames most satisfying into life when Lizzie starts a flirtation. She remains cleverly observant, but concedes a little information about her heart. “He keeps touching my arm, this guy. Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandana on a stick.”

Lizzie knows she can’t run away from home, though, because underlying all this, as the title tells us, is the weather, both political and physical. More things than fiction have changed since 2014, and Lizzie is living, as Twitter users so often lament, in end times. We know this not just because of President Trump and natural signs – a lack of frost, proliferating mice, rogue deer – but because she takes a job with her old college professor, who has become a popular podcaster and futurologist. Lizzie handles all the emails about ecological disaster and global heating. At first, they seem like so many more subjects for funny observations – “lots of people who are not Native Americans talking about Native Americans” – but soon, with the same writerly ease with which she established characters, she has progressed to worrying how far her new skill of making candles from canned tuna might take her, assessing whom she can take to her “Doomstead”, and then how far she could carry her child if she had to, and if her child can have children.

Because Lizzie seems so unnervingly close to us, and because the bad news is seen glancingly, the way we might look at the sun, all of this feels real and near. As she teases us, perhaps our “core delusion is that I am here and you are there”, and there is no comforting fiction in this book at all, only terrifying facts about ecological disaster and encroaching fascism. Perhaps all our clever chat, like all Lizzie’s talk, will get us nowhere. It’s an alarming prospect – reading Weather made me grind my teeth at night, just like its narrator – but it is certainly a brilliant exemplar for the autofictional method. Offill pulls us in close in order to make us worry about things outside us; mirrors the self to show us what we are selfishly ignoring.