Weather by Jenny Offill
Lizzie Benson is a white, middle-class librarian from New York whose life revolves around her brother Henry, a recovering drug addict, her husband Ben, their mildly strained marriage, and her precocious son, Eli. Sylvia, her former university professor, then recruits her to answer listener queries for her climate change podcast “Hell or High Water.” These cover everything from the rapture to political theory: Do angels need sleep? What are the best ways to prepare my children for the coming chaos? What is the philosophy of late capitalism? What is the difference between a disaster and an emergency? Yet, there is no disaster or catastrophe in this book; rather, it is about everyday life in an era of the climate crisis.
Weather is written in a spare, fragmentary style with a fair dash of mordant humour (which readers will recognise from her previous novel Dept. of Speculation). Questions from the podcast – as well as survival tips, statistics, proverbs, and portents – are sprinkled throughout the book, mimicking the way we receive news in our information age. As Lizzie collects more and more facts about the climate crisis, she becomes increasingly obsessed with prepping her imaginary “doomstead” for the end of the world. The fragments soon build up to form an atmosphere of dread, obsession, and worry.
Lizzie’s endless worrying won’t stave off global warming, and this may be Offill’s point. In her review, Christine Smallwood suggests that Weather “is about inaction and the fear of action, the threat of what we know and don’t do anything about.” Offill makes self-aware critiques of privilege, middle-class anxieties, and complicity (as well as taking some sideswipes at the Trump administration). However, her penchant for wry one-liners means that these criticisms are made with a raised eyebrow, which takes some of the sting out of their tail.
So, what is the best way to face the coming chaos? I found myself questioning whether it was the role of literature to offer solutions to these global problems. While there is no specific polemic or call to action in the book, our duty to care for each other, our children, and the planet is of underlying importance. This is exemplified in one of its most beautiful passages: “…in Greek culture it has historically been considered both a duty and an honour to take care of strangers… In ancient times, gods used to test mortals by arriving on their doorsteps clothed in rags to see if they would be welcomed or turned away.” (The name of Lizzie’s son, in Hebrew, means “my god.”) Here we find another meaning of the word “weather:” to endure for those around us, however exhausting we find it.
It’s been said that this novel captures our contemporary mood around the climate crisis – if so, this is a mood of anticipatory dread and exhaustion. If you’re looking for hope, there is little here. However, in the final chapter there is small gesture towards action and hope, when Lizzie’s husband Ben pins a quote from Epictetus above his desk: “Do not be a disinterested bystander / Exert yourself.” Advice, perhaps, that we should all be taking.