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Weather, the latest novel from Jenny Offill, leans into the impending doom. Like Offill’s bestselling Department of Speculation, the novel is structured in diary-like paragraphs, or quick thought bursts featuring some of Offill’s classic one liners. (A woman who nearly hits a family of pedestrians with her car mumbles, “You and your precious lives”). The novel centers around Lizzie, a grad-school dropout turned college librarian living with her husband and son in Brooklyn, whose sides hustle is responding to audience letters sent into her former mentor’s climate change-themed podcast. This podcast, with episode titles like “The Center Cannot Hold”, features interviews with various climate scientists and cultural figures discussing the decline of civilization. The audience questions that Lizzie responds to include, “What will disappear from stores first?”, “Why do humans need myths?”, or “What is surveillance capitalism?”
It is revealed that Lizzie was forced to drop out of grad school to deal with an episode relating to her drug addict brother, who descends into relapse at the birth of his child and new marriage to a woman struggling with similar demons. (Meeting her brother for dinner, Lizzie remarks,”I remind myself [as I often do] never to become so addicted to drugs or alcohol that I’m not allowed to use them.”) Lizzie’s therapist remarks that she is “enmeshed” with her troubled brother, and in many ways these two characters form a sort of doomsday duo—sharing an existential anxiety about protecting their progeny.
Lizzie becomes engulfed in a terror that is at once deeply personal and universal: the impending collapse of the universe and human civilization, and her inability to protect her family from it. When Lizzie’s brother, Henry, watches a video about a refugee mother who had to carry her child on her back for thirty-four miles to reach a camp, Henry worries that he would not be strong enough to do that for his own newborn child. Lizzie responds, “‘you are not going to have to walk thirty-four miles with your child on your back,’…’But if I did’, he says.” But if I did shows up later on in the novel, reasserting this fear that Lizzie and her brother share about their inability to save their loved ones from the wreckage. The very fact of life necessitates death, and thus the fact of having loved ones implies eventually losing them.
Central to the novel is the idea of communal doom—Lizzie’s meditation teacher who believes in reincarnation states, “everyone here has done everything to everyone else.” A large part of this communal doom is this concept of reincarnation, the connection of life and its eventual end, i.e. the birth of children sparks panic at the possibility of their death. Mirroring the life-death duality is a sort of timeline duality in terms of day-to-day worries and universal concerns. For example, Lizzie has concerns about her son’s public school, which is three stories containing mostly East-Asian students, which she believes is built “not on a human scale.” This scale of fears preoccupies Lizzie greatly, as many of her fears of the universal are present in her day-to-day activities, and vice versa. She states, “And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.”
Weather is an all too prescient consideration of what the collapse of the world could look like. The novel does not only address the erosion of environmental resources that will surely result in the end of the physical earth, but the moral and cultural collapse brought on by the toxic political landscape that is constantly devolving into a fraught state of violence and chaos. In the midst of a global pandemic, anxiety-inducing reads may not be at a premium, but Offill injects her pared-down prose with such a sharp sense of humor that makes it hard to look away. Weather is a quick but totally absorbing reading experience, representing just a couple hours of one’s time, while “Of course, the world continues to end”.