Book Review of Jenny Offill’s Weather: Don’t mist out!
I know I’m not punny, but it brings me joy to attempt to be, and in the gloom of lockdown I need it, and maybe you do too. Offill couldn’t have known the pandemic was coming when she wrote Weather, but it made appropriate reading. Just as more personal restrictions than I’d ever thought possible were enforced, I was immersed in a story that in itself feels claustrophobic.
The action largely unfolds in the same place of work, the same home, with the same small cast of characters making appearances on the protagonist’s horizon. There’s a monotony that seems both inescapable and unavoidable. Maybe more than ever, as I’m acutely aware of the role my own tiny kingdom plays in the local microcosm, and out into our wider communities… We are largely staying home for people more vulnerable than ourselves.
Lizzie is largely making herself small to fulfil familial duties, both that of a compassionate sister to a recovering addict, and as an attentive mother. Without either variable to contend with in my own life, I can still feel the weight of the expectations she places on herself. The sleeve summary of the book asks, “(can you) keep tending your own garden once you’ve seen the flames beyond its walls”?
This is a story of an existential crisis in motion, when there isn’t space or time for one, and where the person in said crisis is responding to letters written by other people in the throes of their own existential crises. Lizzie is writing the letters instead of the person they are addressed to, an academic with a cult following off the back of a hit podcast series. If Sylvia (the charismatic, sardonic and independent academic) and Lizzie (the tired librarian) were birds, I suppose one would be a Kingfisher and the other an indistinguishable Little Brown Job. But the LBJ assumes the responsibility the flashier bird shrugs off. Isn’t it so frequently that way? Isn’t it refreshing to see such a dynamic presented between two women, even more so because there is a mutual respect between them? There should be nuance in the conversation we have about the emotional labour put on women, and it’s delicately showcased in Weather. This is a story about the series of inhalations before poise is achieved; the tremor we assume the tightrope walker must feel but not show.
The structure of the book allows for a vast range of topics to feature, whether it be playground politics, gentrification, birth plans, privilege, academia or philosophy; they are sometimes fleetingly mentioned and at other times captured in terse vignettes. Sometimes, Lizzie is answering questions, “How will the last generation know it is the last generation?”, at other times she is ruminating over something she heard at the library, only half-remembered or understood, grasping for firmer footing with it. Consequently, as readers, we get the golden crumbs of the topic without any arduous leg work. A personal favourite, is when an “interconnected” ecology is summed up with a single example, “There is a species of moth in Madagascar that drinks the tears of sleeping birds”
Fans of linguistics and etymology are given plenty to moon over by Offill, without there being a hint of pretension. We are informed: “Withdrawal to the desert is called anachoresis in Greek” and “the Greeks had this term, epoché, meaning, “I suspend judgement.” Useful for those of us prone to making common cause with strangers on buses. Sudden alliances”.
I’m charmed by Lizzie’s ability to quip to herself, about herself. When she ignores her husband’s request not to have the air-con on full-blast, (he’s worrying others in the building might have their power reduced/or it might somehow blow) she just positions herself right in front of it and thinks, “once sadness was considered one of the deadly sins, but this was later changed to sloth. (Two strikes then)” This grim humour makes me feel an odd admiration for her, she’s aware of how close she is to sinking into misery, but needling herself out of succumbing completely. We’ve all been there. Far more than usual in the last year.
The podcast, “The Center Cannot Hold,” is a series of touring lectures about climate change, and the linchpin for the pervasive doom in the novel. While Lizzie’s situational anxiety can ebb and flow, and her successes both swell or diminish, the steady pulsating truth of environmental collapse is omnipresent. Offill doesn’t gloss over or preach about it, by simply holding up a mirror to the way it is insidiously infiltrating our daily psyche, she has identified our shapeshifting nemesis, and it’s exhausting just acknowledging it.
The book was shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and if anything was going to bring me plausible equilibrium during a global pandemic, it was when Lizzie admitted nothing on her to-do list was going to get done that day, and everyone was going to just have to be pissed off that she couldn't meet their needs, “I’m too tired for any of it. The compromise is that we all eat ice cream and watch videos of goats screaming like women.” She didn’t leave us stuck here waiting to exhale.
