WEATHER
JENNY OFFILL
Granta, 224pp, £12.99
The critics loved this short novel narrated by a librarian in New York who takes a second job answering the emails received by her old mentor whose podcast about environmental catastrophe attracts loopy responses from right and left. The narrator quotes from the questions, and gives brief wry glimpses of her life as a wife, mother, sister, daughter increasingly anxious about the future of the planet. Trump becomes president and an Iranian friend tells her, ‘Your people have finally fallen into history...the rest of us are already here.’ Sarah Ditum in the Literary Review suggested that Offill’s fragmentary style ‘hints at the don’t-look-now horror characterising many people’s attitude to climate crisis’.
Lucy Scholes in the Telegraph praised the novel as ‘an uncannily realistic portrait of what it’s like to be alive right now’. Kate Clanchy in the
Guardian admired the smoothness of the characters and backstories which emerge from Offill’s ‘stream of honed observations. She is not solipsistic: she has too many people to care for.’ Weather made Clanchy grind her teeth at night, in the manner of the librarian narrator. She hailed the book as ‘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.’