Weather: A Novel

Jenny Offill’s Weather is a story through the eyes of Lizzie: an academic librarian, mother and assistant to a doomsday futurist – her former research supervisor and host of a popular podcast.

I came nervously to this book, because her last novel Dept. of Speculation is one of my favourite works of fiction of all time. But I was delighted to find that same unpretentious profundity, that quick wit, that macabre obsession. It asks us what it means to raise a child in a world facing climate collapse, and distills and intermingles the micro- and macro-anxieties of contemporary life.

These are all pertinent questions, but what I found most compelling was the protagonist’s close, almost codependent, relationship with her brother – a depressive and a recovering addict. Lizzie describes the relationship as ‘enmeshed’, and it represents a point of tension in her otherwise happy marriage; elsewhere, the podcast describes the interconnectedness of all things: “There is a species of moth in Madagascar that drinks the tears of sleeping birds.” Weather is full of such asides – koan-like one-liners – that can fell you with a breath of air.

It’s very easily digestible, thanks to its choppy, fragmentary form I read it in an afternoon, then reread it the next day. A perfect book for the present moment, in other words, while we are all dealing with racing thoughts and fear as Covid-19 stalks the streets: it has brevity and wit, the power of poetry, and it does it all with a wry smile. Who knew the end days could be so dryly amusing?

I didn’t feel it to have the same gut-punch emotional intensity of the previous book – which dealt with the near-dissolution of a marriage after infidelity, and the weight of wasted potential we each come to bear over time – but I loved it nevertheless, and it will take pride of place on my bookshelf beside its sister.

Cal Flyn