...In 2005, the naturalist Robert Macfarlane asked, in an influential essay in The Guardian: “Where is the literature of climate change? Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?” How should we understand the paucity of the cultural response to climate change, he asked, compared with the body of work catalyzed by the threat of nuclear war? In recent years, however, planetary collapse has emerged as a dominant concern in contemporary fiction; there have been major novels by Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Jeff VanderMeer, Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeanette Winterson. Margaret Atwood’s
“The Testaments,” which examines the connections between totalitarianism and despoliation, shared the Booker Prize last year. Richard Powers’s
“The Overstory,”which follows a group of environmental activists, took the Pulitzer Prize in fiction...
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In Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather,’ Paranoia Is Delivered With HumorBy
Dwight Garner
My wife refuses to use Lyft or Uber in Manhattan because she thinks they’re evil. She thinks I’m a moral cretin for liking both so much. We don’t agree to disagree. We fight it out every time we step outside.
In Jenny Offill’s melancholy and satirical third novel, “Weather,” there’s a small subplot about the narrator’s friendship with a car service driver in New York City. His name is Mr. Jimmy, as if he were Mick Jagger’s friend in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
The narrator, Lizzie, can’t afford car services, not really. She’s a librarian who pays for garlic with pennies at the bodega. She and her husband worry about losing their dental insurance. Lizzie scans their apartment for her “least depressing underwear.” They’re not selling plasma, but things are tight. Lizzie grinds her teeth in her sleep.
In “Weather,” Offill is interested in the things we can save and the things we cannot. Lizzie calls Mr. Jimmy for rides to work because he’s threatened by the Lyfts and Ubers of the world; she thinks she can help him and his disabled son. Her other relief missions have more wobble in them. She’s trying desperately to save her brother, Henry, a former drug addict and a troubled soul... (
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Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’ Is Emotional, Planetary and Very TurbulentBy Leslie Jamison
When the narrator of Jenny Offill’s critically acclaimed and rightfully adored 2014 novel “
Dept. of Speculation” discovers that her husband has been listening to a lecture series called “The Long Now,” she initially assumes these lectures are about “the feeling of daily life,” but eventually she realizes they concern “topics such as Climate Change and Peak Oil.” Her assumption and its wry correction gesture toward a familiar binary — between the implicit solipsism of caring mostly about “the feeling of daily life” and the more enlightened social consciousness of caring about capital-letter Issues.
But Lizzie, the narrator of Offill’s new novel, “Weather,” cares about both. Preoccupied by the apocalyptic horizon of climate change, the dark pulsing terror at the center of the novel, and by the “feeling of daily life,” Lizzie understands — or at least, enacts — the truth that we inhabit multiple scales of experience at the same time: from the minutiae of school drop-offs and P.T.A. activism to the frictions of our personal relationships all the way to the geological immensity of our (not so slowly) corroding planet. Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic — the tensions between self-involvement and social engagement — and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do.
“Weather” is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis, what it means for a woman to be all of these things: a mother packing her son’s backpack and putting away the dog’s “slobber frog,” a sister helping her recovering-addict brother take care of his infant daughter, and a citizen of a possibly doomed planet that might be a very different place for the son whose backpack she is packing, when he packs his own son’s backpack decades from now, or certainly when that someday-son does the same for his own children. (continues)
