Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’ plays in the space between climate and crises.
Lizzie, the narrator, is a librarian working at a university library. She has a husband who makes educational videogames and a son, Eli. Her brother, Henry, is a recovering addict, and her sweet and caring mother lives miles away out of town. Her life is split between trying to enjoy work as much as possible, being a good and attentive mother to her son and listening to her brother’s problems (as well as everybody else’s issues). Much like the wonderful ‘Dept. of Speculation’, the narrator spends a lot of time thinking through thoughts and ideas, musing on images: ‘Now I’m on a park bench, noting the scattered lettuce of someone else’s sandwich. I clean it up, then resent doing it.’ The book is a tribute to Offill’s brilliant, experimental style: small paragraphs that focus on jokes or phrases which can get unpacked or left as stand-alone lines. It zooms in on the power of words and lines like a microscope. Lizzie recalls one conversation with her son, ‘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.’
Lizzie supplements her income by reading answering emails for her old tutor Sylvia whose podcast, ‘Hell and High Water’, has boomed in popularity and Sylvia needs help with the correspondence she gets from it (questions like “What will disappear from stores first?”) – I don’t suppose Offill could ever have predicted that these questions will be accurately answered shortly after publication (the answer in the UK being: pasta, tinned goods and loo roll!)
It is an extraordinary book, at times confessional, as though we are the only people who she can talk through her day-to-day thoughts (‘I don’t know what to do about this car service man’.) It’s a bit like a diary too: ‘Henry and Catherine come over for dinner. She brings giant sunflowers and I try to find a vase to hold them. She seems unnerved by all the books […] Later, she starts a conversation based on the idea that we’re living in unprecedented times,’ – yet another phrase that will surely spring off the page for readers right now (!)
Jenny Offill fuses images so deftly. When her son is trying to find a working felt tip pen, she has this sudden thought: ‘According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience dramatic, life-altering temperatures by 2047.’ So, an innocent domestic scene suddenly becomes heavy, angst ridden. Her character observations are fantastic, hilarious: her brother’s new girlfriend is someone who ‘begins to act and she does not stop acting until the problem is solved.’
I absolutely loved Weather, as much, if not more, than I thought I would. Utterly perfect.
‘Weather’ by Jenny Offill was published by Granta in February 2020.
