In Weathers by Offill, there are small fragments of experience being told in a mosaic manner. The novel is told through a thought-process agency and with a tone of insecurity. A dispense of desire and plot in order to give anecdotal glimpses of how climate issues, mentioned here and there in a sprinkled manner, is simultaneously acknowledged and ignored. The passive juxtaposition to the growing sense of unease in contemporary life, largely told through the narrator, Lizzie, who works as a librarian in a public university, who tries to navigate a world filled with existential worries. This storyline sets up the reader to capture themes of uncertainty and interplay between internal and external crises.

The first theme is uncertainty which is exacerbated by Lizzie’s role at a “Department of Extreme Events,” where she answers questions from people who share their existential concerns about the future. Sylivia, her former mentor, tells Lizzie of her mail filled with expressions of Christian values about the Rapture and global warming. Lizzie recognizes that Sylvia looks fatigue and she as aid replies with, “I say yes, okay, why not, sure” (27). Lizzie’s short and taciturn responses show the absurdity of her unsatisfying responses when suggesting that one prepare for the worst without steps to follow. A blind and naïve way to provide advise that causes a certain anxiety towards the uncertainty of the world. Lizzie also has a line of thinking and a pensive reflection that leaves one with an eerie sensation towards the preposterousness of her job. People tend to seek answers to the labyrinthine mysteries, even though deep down, they know no one has any definitive answers to such grand queries. She concludes that, “Our mother was definitely saved, but were we really? What if we came home and the house was empty? (35-36). This is a thought that highlights the futility of attempting to reassure herself and others when in reality there is a lack of clarity, stability, and control in the world. One trying to make the unknown a comfortable thought causes turmoil for others who simply cannot wrap their head around such beliefs and mindsets. Attempting to make the intangible tangible is an anxiety and fear driven way to cope.

The second theme is an interplay between the internal and external crises. Offill explores the burden of global change due to fast moving and repressive societies which are mirrored through Lizzie’s relationship with her husband and her brother Henry. There are moments when Lizzie feels disconnected from her husband because he is so focused on his work that he loses sight of her internal concerns with the external world around them, making her feel more alone. Lizzie expresses her frustration with her husband as he reads the Stoics saying that she pleaded with him not to, “…look down upon the person you love while he or she is sleeping and remind yourself: Tomorrow you will die” (94). A dismaying moment that illuminates the tension between Lizzie’s personal fret towards the world around her and the inability to get that across to someone she is close to. Lizzie feels both responsible for her brother and powerless to help him, conveying the broader sense of helplessness she feels about the world’s future. Henry struggles with addiction and admits to Lizzie that he misses drugs because they quieted the sounds of the world around him. At the supermarket, Lizzie says, “All around us things tried to announce their true nature. But their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music” (5). This observation implies that reality, whether it’s personal, social, or environmental, is always trying to show itself bluntly, but that this truth is often obscured or overlooked by other forces. The “radiance” of the world’s true nature is “faint” because it is being drowned out by the louder and more vehement forces at play in our lives; whether that’s the chaos of contemporary events in one’s daily life, or our own personal fears and distractions.

Embarking an unravel of internal emotional turmoil, nail-biting climate change, and societal instability, Offill presents a narrative that feels fragmented, similar to the way modern life can feel unpredictable and overwhelming. The tone is dark humored, underscoring the absurdity of trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy in the face of these crises. I felt that this lingering message was very resonate in my life as a New Yorker where there is a pressing but often neglected awareness of climate change, societal unsteadiness, or personal crises that are manifesting in the world. These realities aren’t fully acknowledged or understood by most people, which is why this novel can be beneficial for dragging that out to the surface.

Jenny Offill’s novel is a comedy of a climate fiction novel. Offill begins her discussion by providing anecdotal moments within our narrator’s life. These moments, at first, go into some background about the actors within this novel. We meet Henry, a recovering addict that may have a chance at love, Eli, her son, and her husband, Ben, who seems to be a minor character designed for a set purpose. Through this we are introduced to Sylvia, her mentor and boss, controlling a “doomsday” podcast. It is through Offill’s novel, Weather, that the gap between environmentalists, doomsday preppers, and those integrated into the “everyday Anthropocene” comes together into a comedic interpretation of what it is like to live on a dying planet.

While our narrator’s job is to answer questions that come into Sylvia’s Hell and High Water, including many religious or climate fanatics claiming the end of the world is near or asking how to better prepare, we see her family and surrounding acquaintances living within the “everyday anthropocene”. Henry is starting a life and family with his partner Catherine. Ben is following politics. Eli is making friends at school. It seems that the setting for this novel is almost painstakingly ordinary. In Ghosh’s novel, The Hungry Tide, we watch the visitors to the tide country experience an ever changing landscape and fight for survival. Similarly, in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, we watch as a band of misfits come together to try to survive the country’s collapse into dystopia. Offill takes a more subtle approach, and perhaps a more effective one in describing an ordinary woman’s life that readers can imagine themselves in, thus creating a truer replica of the Anthropocene in Western countries.

At first, Lizzie, our beloved narrator, is content with making jokes and laughing at the crazy letters coming into her mailbox.  She says “‘ Environmentalists are so dreary,” or says that “ the hippie letters are a hundred times more boring than the end-timer ones,” (Offill, 51). Further in, however, she begins to wonder about the state of the world. Offill provides these small intervals in which politics interfere with Lizzie’s everyday life. She provides a moment in which Lizzie feels people are “sick of being lectured to about the glaciers,” and a man says to her “But what’s going to happen to the American weather?”( Offill, 73). This is a way that Offill can comedically remind readers that there are people out there simply concerned with the everyday Anthropocene. Not worried about our planet’s decline but how it will affect their day to day living. Yet as Lizzie answers these “hippie and end-timer letters” she begins to question her own everyday Anthropocene. After learning about “climate departure” and speaking to her husband about it, Ben, when asked what is new with Lizzie and him, states that “‘ Lizzie has become a crazy doomer,” ( Offill, 89).

The novel is sneaky in the way it reveals itself as a climate fiction novel. There are jokes about using antibacterial soap and Blue No. 1 dyes to make readers laugh about what is actually important. There are jokes about letting bills pile up with the punchline being “get organized or die”( Offill, 74). Offill provides a view of an everyday Anthropocene and then highlights the things that must be noticed to recognize that our planet is declining at a rapid rate. Offill’s novel does a great job of making fun of most people, yet never alienating anyone. Offill’s novel is climate fiction without relying on the usual tropes necessary to provide an introspective novel questioning our relationship to our planet. It bridges the gap between those fanatics that are either environmentalists, hippies, or end-timers with those who maybe think too much about the everyday, such as the character Catherine, or people concerned with antibacterial hand soap.

This is especially for the little handful of students interested in writing about Offill for the final project, but:

• Check out this winsome longish piece on Offill in the NYT when Weather was published
• And this review of the novel from LA Review of Books, which emphasizes the “prepper” theme in ways that connect the novel to Butler’s work (and especially Clausen’s reading of it)

Part 2 of Weather by Jenny Offill centers more heavily around ideas of politics, and it becomes clearer how we could make the claim that this is a cli fi novel, as we become more adjusted in Lizzie’s setting as well. This section begins to illustrate people’s political attitudes, and how that relates to climate. The narrator’s thought-like style makes this even easier to see, as we are subject to many experiences and inputs at once–much like the way we experience real life. For example, after short comments on “red, white, and blue popsicles” and voting, she says that people are getting “really sick of being lectured about the glaciers”, and that they’ve heard all about it–they just want to know “what’s going to happen to the American weather?” Lizzie compiles and glazes over these experiences, making it an effective cli-fi novel in its form, as it reflects what Haraway might call the daily anthropocene. It also depicts the worry over our waning attention spans as it relates to our ability to organize for a common cause or priority. We know that climate is a problem, that the city “will begin to experience dramatic, life altering temperatures by 2047”, but there is just so much else going on that snips away at our ability or even our desire to organize critically around these thoughts. For Lizzie, and many of us, this includes our jobs, schools, and relationships, and the same way that she bounces from one topic to the next, each getting just about the same screen time, we give the same amount of brain power to all sorts of random bits of information that we get throughout the day. Although this style of writing might be parallel to some real world, choppy, incoherent thinking, I feel it is still really interesting as a style in the way that it shows us we do not need much detail to get ourselves situated in a story. We have no idea what Henry looks like, we didn’t know who our narrator really was until the end of part 1, we don’t know what they like or don’t like, what they wear, or what their apartment looks like. Much of the time that “typical” novels devote to setting the scene is spent instead on jumping from one thought to the next, and we still can pick up the pieces and understand what is going on, to construct the perhaps irrelevant details ourselves. Maybe even this in itself is a comment on how what we think is important might not actually be necessary in order to effectively move in the world. In the same way we do not know what shoes Lizzie or Sylvia are wearing, it might not matter as much what we look like as what our principles are. We know they are concerned about the environment and are trying to make their points heard, we don’t know what they look like doing it. It reminds me of the discussion in the beginning of the semester regarding Nixon’s Slow Violence, and how technology and social media have created a world where everything is on the same level of importance to us: from morals to politics to our skincare routines. Maybe everything that is missing from Offill’s novel in terms of details is actually done on purpose as a comment on their unnecessariness. 

Another thing about part 2 plot wise is that we get to learn more about Lizzie. We see more clearly some marriage troubles she has, from critiques about her doing work around the house, to having a “real” job, and even annoyance at the amount of time she spends on the phone with her mother. We also see that, just as she avoids people from her son’s school, like Nicolla, they are also avoiding her. As her brother now has responsibilities in his own new family, it might be interesting to see if Lizzie reaches an increasingly isolative place in the novel, and what effect this might have on her thinking patterns. Especially since this section creates emphasis on the increasingly perilous state of the world, alluding to climate change and Trump’s first election, it would seem that it should be most helpful for Lizzie to alleviate her concerns, rather than brushing everything off as a joke. If this novel is meant to be a comment on the way we as a collective handle crises, I wonder what role the other characters are going to play, and if their role is strategic in some way, or merely supplementary to Lizzie. 

How does Jenny Offills weather portray the relationship between personal anxiety and global crises through Lizzie, and in what ways do these external pressures amplify these personal anxieties and existential crises?