Jenny Offill: The Doomy Bits
Photo: Michael Lionstar With her new novel Weather on the shelf next to 2014’s Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill has written two of our most essential books about right-the-hell-now.
Dept. of Speculation plunged us into a life in disarray—bedbugs and infidelity plagued the narrator in equal measure—but also introduced us to Offill’s new way of being on the page. In her first novel since 1999’s Last Things, Offill managed to make a book sidle up and talk to you like someone you see every day on your commute, but with whom you had never exchanged a single word.
Weather extends this mode, moving from the loneliness of Dept. of Speculation to despair. The novel’s story—about a failed academic named Lizzie, her job as a librarian, her other job answering emails for a podcast about climate change, her addict brother and his new recovering addict wife, their aging mother, Lizzie’s passing fancy for a handsome survivalist, her husband and child, and her own evolving, mutating cocktail of anguish and hope—has its broadest reach in the unceasing worry enveloping them all. Lizzie has an insatiable love of information, even as she doubts that knowing things can save her and her loved ones from the sort of disaster that Sylvia, her old advisor and current doom-and-gloom podcaster, predicts.
The novel’s quick, epigrammatic brushstrokes and observations are often at seeming, frustrating, or hilarious odds with the very next insight. Read quickly or slowly, Weather takes us right up to the largest questions there are. And yet, books of such magnitude aren’t supposed to be this easy to read, are they?
Offill’s novels are hard to summarize, driven by narratives and characters whose movements on the page are discursive and wonderfully indirect. Ultimately, this works to make her stories seem more real: as a caretaker of the people around her, Lizzie speaks to them—and to us—both directly and indirectly; giving voice to the offhand and the seemingly irrelevant alongside things of great consequence. All the while, she does the best she can, even as her brother’s addiction sneaks in sideways, her ethics devolve into a series of chores, and the clock keeps ticking on a society that can’t stop obsessing over trivial goals and deadlines.
As we consider what it means to live day-to-day alongside seemingly intractable problems, I wanted to hear more from the author who has tackled this tension while staying true to all our fallacies. So I drove over the Berkshires and a little ways down the Hudson to meet her at a small, unassuming bakery with a reputation for good macaroons.
—Drew Johnson for Guernica
This novel used to be called —now it’s.
