Weather

Author(s): Jenny Offill

Novel | Read our reviews! | Fiction Reductions

From the author of Dept. of Speculation, a dazzling and deadpan new novel about hope and despair, fear and comfort as it plays out in these times of environmental and political turbulence.


'What are you afraid of, he asks me and the answer of course is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity, then he says what are your most useful skills? People think I'm funny'


Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink.


For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As she dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. 


When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to acknowledge the limits of what she can do. But if she can't save others, then what, or who, might save her? And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

_______________________
THOMAS'S REVIEW:
Climate is only experienced as weather. Climate becomes comprehensible only when experiences of weather are arrayed over time. To read a novel — especially one written in the present tense as is Jenny Offill’s new novel — is to experience moments of ‘weather’, each moment the expression of, or contributing to, the ‘climate’ of the book. Weather is written as a series of brief paragraphs or observations — moments — that read as waspish autofiction, very funny but borne by an underlying anxiety that particularises itself in the narrator’s life but is indicative of wider — ‘climactic’ — ills (climate change, far right extremism, the struggle for meaning and fulfilment against the last throes of capitalism and the obligations and limitations of your personal circumstances, &c). Lizzie’s life is a seemingly endless round of underachievement and misdirection. She failed to complete her degree; she ends up working in an academic library and answering e-mails for her former supervisor; her husband is also not doing what he would like to be doing but working in IT; she cares for and worries about, and worries about caring for, her son and her dog; her relationship with her ex-addict brother has all the signs of co-dependency; she can’t help viewing the daily circumstances of her life with a scorn that is at once protective and reflexive. The narrative arc of her life is shaped by a downward pull (which, after all, is what makes an arc of anything that has propulsion or is caught up in some sort of propulsion not its own). Her yoga teacher says to her, “You seem to identify down, not up. Why do you think that is?” Her life is moving through the years, but she is finding it increasingly hard to feel connected with what is supposed to be important to her: her husband and child, her hopes and intentions (whatever they were). “My #1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing, supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.” Her prioritising — or induction — of her brother’s neediness, and her existential fecklessness and feelings of entrapment in her circumstances (“I hate everyone, I said. Mildly, I’ll argue, but not mildly enough apparently.”) leads to her husband and son going on holiday without her, and Lizzie flirts with the idea of being the object of the attention of a man she meets first on a bus. Chronic inertia and congenital underachievement are virtues as much as they are weaknesses, though, and, when Lizzie’s husband returns, the novel ends on a quietly cosy note that is somehow radical in its affirmation of small moments of hopeful weather in a climate definitely changing for the worse. 


 STELLA'S REVIEW:
A novel made from snippets of conversation, observations, facts and wry asides, Jenny Offill’s Weather is contemplative and challenging in its examination of human nature and climate change. You won’t see the dystopic disaster trail here, nor the high-minded rhetoric, as Lizzie, a university librarian navigates the minutiae of her Brooklyn world—mother, wife, sister, daughter, academic dropout, comfortable middle class—and the monumental nature of the changing environment. You will feel a sense of companionship with a woman who sees the approaching crisis but isn’t sure how to tackle it. Lizzie is self-deprecating and highly likeable—even when she puts her ‘recovered addict’ brother ahead of her own partner and child. Who hasn’t had a conflict of loyalty? Her wry observations of the regular library users and her immediate community—the school where her son is in the gifted class but it’s still a liberal heaven with its diversity and philosophy, the other parents, and the increasing polarised views she encounters in her side-line job—shine a darkly funny beam into this novel with serious intent. Employed by her friend, Slyvia, who has a popular climate change podcast, to answer questions sent to her, the letters and emails come from across the spectrum—from the left-liberals who want a solution to the preppers, the deniers, and the confused. These questions send Lizzie on her own quest to understand and counter her growing anxiety about the weather. Running alongside her desire to reassure others and herself is her commitment to her brother, who is battling his feelings of inadequacy in the face of being newly married (to a controlling—probably necessarily so—woman) and their newborn. Lizzie steps in, as she always has, to ‘rescue’ him—her own addiction. In the hands of a different author, this could be melodrama or heavy-handed prophesying but Jenny Offill’s episodic style and her cleverness makes Weather an unexpected joy to read. It’s a novel rich in ideas, both serious and playfully ironic. Like Lizzie, how do we have a sense of urgency when all is comfort with the occasional pinprick?  


 


 

28.00 NZD

Stock: 2

Add to Cart


Add to Wishlist


Product Information

Shortlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction 2020

Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It's this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present -- Ben Lerner
No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill -- Jia Tolentino
Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like the ashes from the burning world she describes -- Sheila Heti
Weather is a beautiful book, both subtle and powerful. In writing, that's a superhuman feat. And now is exactly when we need the superhumans. Make haste. Read it -- Lydia Millet
Novelists don't need to dream the end of the world anymore - they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today's few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it's as if they are all cut from one diamond -- Jonathan Dee, author of * The Privileges *

Jenny Offill's novel Dept. of Speculation was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, and was chosen as a book of the year over 20 times, including by the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, FT, Daily Mail, Stylist, Observer and Vogue. She is also the author of the novel Last Things, and four books for children. She lives upstate New York with her family.

General Fields

  • : 9781783784769
  • : Granta Books
  • : Granta Books
  • : November 2019
  • : ---length:- '19.8'width:- '12.9'units:- Centimeters
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Jenny Offill
  • : Hardback
  • : 2020
  • : English
  • : 813.6
  • : 224
  • : FA