‘Weather’ unleashes dark humor with bouts of laughter
When I heard Jenny Offill had a new novel hitting the shelves this winter, I was overjoyed. Her last novel, the much-acclaimed “Dept. of Speculation,” stunned me with its experimental approach and the darkly humorous voice of its narrator. Like “Dept. of Speculation,” Ms. Offill’s latest novel, “Weather,” is told in razor-sharp associative vignettes. It is just as difficult to put down as its predecessor, despite its heavier thematic content.
“Weather” centers on Lizzy, a doctorate dropout and librarian, as she navigates daily life at work and at home. When Sylvia, her old mentor, offers her a job answering her email for a climate disaster podcast she runs called “Hell and High Water,” Lizzie hesitantly agrees. As Lizzie becomes entrenched in the world of preppers and doomers, she looks away from her family and spends her time focusing on the impending apocalypse.
Lizzy is often wry and insightful as she struggles to make it through the day to day in a world that feels increasingly dystopian. Ms. Offill distills modern horrors big and small into short, punchy bursts, including observations on the refugee crisis, heightened white supremacy, gentrification, and advice for living on a planet that is growing less inhabitable every day. She tackles all of this, as well as adjuncts selling their plasma and nervous white women swarming clinics for IUDs and much more, without weighing down the plot arc — an incredible feat in novelizing the political.
Readers may notice a resemblance between Lizzy and many well-meaning liberals: She’s implicated in her neighborhood’s gentrification but can’t afford to live anywhere else. She tries to convert her feelings of helplessness into meaningful action but often fails, as when she gives change to a homeless woman she once gave $10 to and the woman is clearly disappointed. She employs a car service out of convenience although the bus is faster and more affordable, and out of guilt because the owner of the company and sole driver, Mr. Jimmy, is losing his business to Uber. One day, after discussing background checks for his drivers, Mr. Jimmy makes an Islamophobic remark. Instead of engaging with him in a meaningful way, she flees from the car and thinks, “And just like that I am free.”
The book also depicts the absurdity of modern life and our coping mechanisms for pain, as seen when Lizzy, too wary to connect with her husband and son, proposes they eat ice cream and watch videos of goats that scream like women. Dark humor offers levity on every page. When encountering a transhumanist at a dinner party who asks about her favorite social media platforms, Lizzy says she doesn’t use any because they make her feel like “a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever. Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage!”
In another prescient scene, an old white professor reads a poem from the point of view of a hat. He condescends to his students in attendance, “I have written about a hat, though I have never been a hat.” This line should strike a chord for those familiar with the literary community at large, where white writers are often defensive when taken to task for racist representations in their books (ahem, “American Dirt”).
While on a first read, I found the opening somewhat slow; on second read, I noticed how the sections built on top of one another. When the central conflicts became more personal to Lizzy and less abstracted, the novel speeds along at a clip. Although there were only a few fragments that allude to the 2016 election, the atmosphere of the novel is permeated by the nervous energy and fear that lead up to it, and the helplessness many of us felt afterward. Characters try to convert their despair into action, such as Lizzy’s mother, a devout Christian, who visits deportation camps, and Lizzy’s brother Henry, a recovering drug addict, who tries to get his life on track. Lizzy’s husband, Ben, provides small comforts for his family and pours himself into projects to make their daily lives more bearable.
On the whole, “Weather” is a crucial read because it’s reflective of our particular moment. I devoured it in two sittings. Like much of what we see on the news every day, it’s tempting to look away and shield ourselves, but this book implores us to do our best to pay attention and hold onto joy where we can find it.