Weather by Jenny Offill

With its themes of climate change in the immediate present and the mostly thankless emotional labour of women, Jenny Offill’s Weather feels uncomfortably close to home in 2020, a year when the domestic realm has become newly prominent – and Covid 19 has thrown the most urgent issue of our time, climate change, into the background of the news cycle and conversation.

Weather quietly animates these questions – the ungraspable heft of climate change, the weight of caring for others – through the daily round of its narrator, Lizzie Benson, in her demanding roles as university librarian, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, neighbour and paid email correspondent for her former professor turned futurologist. Her only release from the pressure of these many competing demands is the prospect of an affair.

This trajectory – the repetitive dullness of a woman’s caring life, and her escape through flirtation, an affair – is the stuff of drama in literature as in life, but here, coupled with Lizzie’s mounting anxiety over climate change, it makes for a strangely muted kind of narrative unfolding. Climate change disrupts stories and the way they’re told.

This may be why this book crept up on me slowly, unlike Offill’s last novel Dept. of Speculation, about the competing demands of motherhood and art, which hooked me from the first page:

Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.

It was still months before we’d tell each other all our stories. And even then some seemed too small to bother with. So why do they come back to me now? Now, when I’m so weary of all of it.

Like that novel, Weather is set in Brooklyn, relates loosely to Offill’s own life, and is composed of fragments: brief conversational exchanges, facts, minutiae, astute observations and deadpan asides. 

The novel’s tenor is set by its single epigraph, from the year 1640, whose hubris spells trouble for the earth’s weather 400 years hence:

NOTES FROM A TOWN MEETING IN MILFORD, CONNECTICUT, 1640:

Voted, that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.

Lizzie’s library job gives her access to the numerous pointed facts which pepper her story – such as ‘Studies have shown that 94% of college professors think that they do above average work.’ – and a host of eccentric characters: ‘the one who is most enlightened’, ‘the doomed adjunct’, ‘the man in the shabby suit’ and ‘the lonely heart engineer’.

These facts, these people, weigh on her. She cannot escape their presence. When her former professor Sylvia offers to pay her to answer the torrent of correspondence she receives about her climate-change podcast from people who ‘are either crazy or depressed’, Lizzie hesitates ‘because it’s possible my life is already filled with these people’. But of course she accepts the job – she can’t stop helping others – and through this, added to all her other responsibilities, comes a dawning sense of her responsibility to the future of the planet.

As her husband Ben remarks: ‘I wish you were a real shrink, then we’d be rich.’

Offill is gifted at conveying character and brilliant on the many dimensions of family life, including marriage and motherhood. For example:

“‘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.” 

And:

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person?

He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.

As this suggests, Offill is funny, in a wry, understated kind of way. When a ‘young techno-optimist guy’ asks Lizzie what her favoured social media platforms are …

I explain that I don’t use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever.

Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty!

He looks at me and I can see him calculating all the large and small ways I am trying to prevent the future. “Well, good luck with that, I guess,” he says.

And this, a question asked by ‘the mostly enlightened woman’ in a meditation class that Lizzie has finally joined:

“I have been fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time in the melted ego world. But I find I have trouble coming back to the differentiated world, the one you were just talking about where you have to wash the dishes and take out the garbage.”

She was very pregnant, six months maybe. Oh, don’t worry, I thought, the differentiated world is coming for your ass.

And she has a gift for succinct observation, in aphorisms such as:

Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?

Old person worry: What if everything I do does?

And:

Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism?

A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on a trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on. “You can’t outrun a bear,” the other whispers. “I just have to outrun you,” he says.

In an interview with the Guardian, Offill said she wrote Weather because ‘I became interested in why I wasn’t more interested.’ She wanted to explore how you could be aware of an impending disaster without feeling emotionally connected to it or moved to act.

But writing the novel made her vow to shift from her mostly bookish engagement with climate change to activism: ‘I no longer felt like I could opt out. I no longer felt like it wasn’t my fight. Out of the library, into the streets. But, boy, is it a nerve-racking place to be!’

And so she ends Weather with the URL of a website she called ‘Obligatory Note of Hope’, which includes ‘Tips for Trying Times’ and links to ‘People of Conscience’ and three environmental activist organisations: Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement and Transition Towns.

For me the best thing about Weather is the way it embeds climate change firmly in the present in a real place and not in some future dystopia, and centres it in the domestic realm. Lizzie’s ambient anxiety is palpable and familiar - and as a salve, Offill’s concluding website offers ‘hope’: possible avenues through which to channel anxiety into action. This is a compact, suggestive novel which completely absorbed me once I’d got into its rhythm, after 50 pages or so. I didn’t love it as much as other readers have - perhaps because I read it straight after one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read, Anne Boyer’s The Undying, and Olivia Laing’s mesmerising The Lonely City, which I’ll be writing about next, and while I was reading Jess Hill’s devastating and brilliant See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse. This has been a weird year in so many ways, but for me it’s also been a year of exceptionally good reading. I’ve just finished another extraordinary work of poetic non-fiction, Nathalie Leger’s Suite for Barbara Loden - and I’m now devouring Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults. Stay tuned …