Storm front looms

Novel keeps a weather eye on modern anxieties

Weather Jenny Offill Knopf

Lizzie Benson is the anxious and overburdened Brooklyn-based narrator of Weather, who finds her fears snowballing in the face of two contemporary emergencies: the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the escalating climate crisis. “But hasn’t the world always been going to hell in a handbasket?” Lizzie, a university librarian, asks in a conversation with Sylvia, her old tutor who now hosts a popular podcast called Hell and High Water.

“Parts of the world, yes, but not the world entire,” Sylvia replies.

In Weather, author Jenny

Offill employs a fragmented form similar to her earlier novel

Dept. of Speculation, but the ambience is notably different. Dept. of Speculation propelled itself forward at bracing speed by a marriage-in-distress plot. Weather, by comparison, finds its momentum in nervous energy, as everyday anxieties rub up against near-paralyzing fears about “the coming chaos.” Like any working mother, Lizzie’s life is a juggling act, but she’s also more attuned to other people’s pain than most.

First and foremost on Lizzie’s mind is her recovering-addict brother, Henry, whose behaviour is becoming increasingly neurotic. But she’s also worried about Mr. Jimmy — whose car service she uses more often than she can afford because she feels guilty that he’s lost all his other customers — and the adjunct professor who looks pale enough to suggest he’s selling his plasma again. At the same time there’s the unpleasant neighbour Lizzie’s trying to avoid, the regret that she didn’t have more children

“so I could have more chances,” not to mention the nagging pain in her knee. She also really needs to go to the dentist, and to get her moles checked, especially now that Trump’s been elected and her husband fears they’re going to lose their jobs and health insurance.

But at the same time, after she takes on extra work answering the emails Sylvia receives in response to her podcast — “Lots of questions about the Rapture mixed in with the ones about wind turbines and carbon taxes” — Lizzie is well on her way to becoming a full-on “crazy doomer.” She starts staying up late “Googling prepper things” in order to plan for the worst, but also to distract herself from the more immediate demands on her conscience.

Whereas Offill’s elliptical, epigrammatic approach felt fresh and revelatory in Dept. of Speculation, here it feels necessary in a more elemental way. By shattering her narrative into glistening shards, Offill replicates Lizzie’s fraught lived experience.

Weather achieves a rare triumph — it’s an uncannily realistic portrait of what it’s like to be alive right now. And, of course, where there’s life, there’s hope.