Jenny Offill’s Weather may be a climate novel the literary establishment celebrates, but it is not the climate novel our time needs. This book, written in her signature fragmented prose, is ostensibly about the environment, existential dread, and love. It tackles climate change the way a certain milieu of our cultural elite does: by entertaining the subject in broad generalities while avoiding getting one’s hands too dirty. The novel is elegiac chum in the water.
The protagonist, Lizzie, is a librarian who takes on a side gig helping answer reader mail for an old mentor’s podcast, titled Hell or Highwater. The podcast and library bring forth an array of stock characters for Lizzie, who fancies herself a better-than-average armchair psychologist, to scrutinize. The podcast is climate- and science-themed, and the reader mail provides an opportunity for Offill to trot out the survival trivia she has accumulated in the interim of a decade since her last novel. There are glimpses of insight in the questions and answers Lizzie proffers: “What is this? The future,” and “How will the last generation know it is the last generation?” But her much-heralded wit is disproportionately hyped by critics.
The New York Times ran three pieces in fawning ardor preceding the publication of Weather. Parul Seghal’s lengthy feature characterizes the novel as a protective manual, a Guide to Survive the Great Climate Collapse that Offill has bestowed upon her child. Seghal’s unmitigated praise gives the impression that the book will be a climate-change edition of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Offill’s reference to tending one’s own garden brings to mind Eula Biss’s On Immunity, which also ends on a Voltairean note (not to mention the further parallels of protective maternal yearning and anguish in the face of a changing world). Amid all the talk of timeliness and political intent, one might almost have forgotten that Weather is a novel. There is a separation between Offill and her protagonist. Weather centers on the interior life of an anxious woman who happens to have a son. It’s conspiratorial—you’re let in on her petty concerns about being avoided by other mothers from her son’s school—but the result is not a portrait of love for her son. The reality of the final product fails to live up to Seghal’s claims of motherly intent.
For all the worship of Offill’s prose, the language leaves something to be desired. The diaristic and colloquial cadence is disarming at first, but ultimately descends to prosaic monotony. Sometimes plain writing is, in fact, plain. The book completely loses its charm when she mimics the hackneyed sentiments so popular on Twitter: “my search history is going to land me on a watchlist.” Others have pointed to Offill’s “flippant” sense of humor, a generous reading of the merely trite.
The book’s shortcomings are, in large part, the result of its trying to do too many things at once. Offill’s distaste for traditional plot could be forgiven and, indeed, is often celebrated, but Weather does not navigate the chop as successfully as her prior works. Instead, it is as if Offill has steered towards the rocks on purpose, only to feign surprise at finding herself in a wreck. The later sections of the book are dedicated not to the immediacy of the climate crisis but to the political fray of 2016 and its aftermath. The attempt at catharsis in the face of fear and political vexation comes across as indulgent.
The weak-spirited politics of the novel do a disservice to the animus of the book. One trap of climate fiction, really of all stories of decay or decline, is a desire to place blame—to argue that somehow the predicament humanity faces could have been addressed and mitigated by leadership, or is just a consequence of a failure to prepare. By situating President Trump as a villain in the novel, Offill has dated it indefinitely and condescended to her readers. The attempt to grapple with the 2016 election distracts and steals from what Weather could have explored with finer focus.
Still, it’s not until the last forty pages that we get lions’ share of the so-called “survival manual.” Her attention pulled in any number of directions, her marriage crumbling in tandem with the world around her, Lizzie embarks on an emotional affair. It is through this gratuitous dalliance that Offill parses out the remainder of her doomsday-prepper fundamentals. It is all meant to serve as a reminder that, while we may have the luxury of seeking solace in other bodies should our primary entanglements fail or fall apart, we still don’t yet have a Planet B. It comes off as contrived.
When Lizzie gets around to remembering she has a son, she wonders where the safest place to live will be. The afterthought, again, does not read like a passage written in the throes of maternal love or devotion. Weather reads as if Offill was unable to decide on which story she wanted to tell, so she dropped them all into a blender and pressed pulverize.
In effect, the book captures the do-nothing desire for participation credit that characterizes our age. Lizzie seems to be looking for a pat on the head without meaningfully changing her behavior. One could be driven to sympathize with Greta Thunberg’s rage—if it is really as bad as everyone says it is, why is no one actually acting like it?
General ambivalence hangs over the novel like a heavy, moth-eaten coat. For example, “I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action.” There is a lot of wondering. For all this talk of action and tending one’s own garden, the preemptive grief of Weather feels more akin to burying something alive.