Weather by Offill has an interesting narration that presents the narrator’s thoughts on daily interactions. The narrator’s thoughts were cut off without finishing. The book’s tone is dull, and passive, and has negative perspectives towards life as it jumps between different encounters. It’s a bold way of writing a novel because tone is essential in the beginning to catch the reader’s interest. Furthermore, the readers could struggle to understand the plot of this book’s formation. If I bypassed this book, I would most likely drop it off because I wasn’t able to understand the plot from the beginning. This makes me question whether I am reading this book for entertainment or education wise? What is the line drawn for Si-Fi to be more fiction or science-based? Should Si-Fi be limited by these two option or could be more creative?

Secondly, this book offers a different narration from Bulter and Ghosh’s book where it doesn’t have a visible plot, romantic relationships, or a visible connection to the environmental crisis. One connection between Butler, Ghosh, and Offill’s book is references to religion. In the books of Butler and Ghosh, religion is portrayed in a positive light that symbolizes community, guidance, and hope. However, in this book, the references are from the bible is being interrogated. For example, “Does extinction matter since we know how the Bible ends?” (Offill 27). This example offers a different mindset towards anthropogenic destruction where people have knowledge from the bible of the extinction of humans and accept it to happen just in a matter of time. Another example is, “When are the Days of Tribulation? Did Noah’s flood cover the whole earth or just the places where people lived?” (Offill 35). These are the questions that I encounter from believers and non-believers as we see more frequent news of natural disasters and wars between countries erupting. This reflects that the questions are realistic and can be situated in our day-to-day lives. Moreover, the questions present the fears and depressive perspectives of the environmental crisis worsen although there is no exposition of environmental concern in the book. It could be implied in any situation, not just in the past or the future.

Lastly, this book could connect to Haraway’s idea of a deeper connection of kinship between humans and other critters. One example to present this idea is, “I tell Eli I will take him out to eat at the dinner. NO ANIMALS ALLOWED, the sign outside the restaurant reads. ‘But we are animals, right?'” (Offill 34-35). This proves humans are no different from other critters and should be responsible for the environmental crisis as we are all refugees on Earth.

The way this book is written immediately caught my eye. In a way, the writing style of this book can reflect Lizzie as a character and her emotional state. Lizzie has so much going on. She is a middle-aged woman who lives life with a sense of unease. She is a Librarian at a university and is an “assistant” for Sylvia. She has a son named Eli, a brother who she is very close to, and a husband. However, the relationship between Lizzie and her husband seems kind of distant and incompatible. This marriage seems like a routine in a way.

So far in the novel, Lizzie comes off as emotionally detached from the situations she faces, and sometimes she finds herself facing them with dark humor, which can be awkward. As she deals with both her personal life and the state of the world she lives in, her thoughts/observations are shown in very brief and “broken up” sentences, which is a reflection of Lizzie as a character. This style of writing is interesting and makes the book more relatable. This reflects the life of an average person. As someone who works a job, takes seven classes and attempts to go to the gym every other day, my thoughts are very “all over the place” as well. There is so much going on in the world that I sometimes feel overstimulated, which is the vibe I get from Lizzie so far in this novel. The novel reflects/mirrors the chaos and scatteredness of life, where people are very often forced to manage multiple emotional/intellectual situations all at once.

Lizzie’s quiet/passiveness can also suggest to the reader that she is still figuring out the meaning of life or for meaning in the world, which feels meaningless to her now. She does not have any clear goals for herself, which forces her to simply go through life dealing with small tasks while being aware of the larger existential crises that go on in the world. She is very disconnected from the world, and this is shown through her relationships as well, not only with her husband but with her brother as well. These relationships’ tension and awkwardness broadly reflect her emotional detachment from others. She often avoids people and does not like to engage in much conversation with others. This aligns with this book; the themes of dreading existential crises in this case climate change and the difficulties of navigating a world full of personal situations.

The novel, “Weather” by Jenny Offill surrounds the life of Lizzie, who is a librarian at a college campus and works a side job at answering letters that are submitted to a podcast titled, “Hell and High Water”. In comparison to the protagonists of “Parable of The Sower” and “The Hungry Tide”, Lizzie is the “most normal” protagonist that we have encountered in our novels that we’ve read in this course. Lizzie’s character is the embodiment of the average American citizen, Working Class, and a Parent. This makes it so Lizzie is more relatable to the reader, giving us a glimpse of how average people would approach these scenarios. However, what separates Lizzie from Lauren and Piya, is also what separates Weather from the other novels; it’s that there’s a very slow progression as the novel focuses on an average person’s life.

Despite all that, there are still little elements of “cli-fi” that are touched upon through the letter submissions that Lizzie encounters and the podcast, and through that we can see how Offill interprets the average person to react to, “climate fiction.” As an example, on Page 46 it reads, “Sylvia tells the audience that the only reason we think humans are at the height of evolution is that we have chosen to privilege certain things above other things. For example, if we privileged the sense of smell, dogs would be deemed more evolved.” (Offill, Pgs. 47 and 48) This piece of evidence can be connected to Fraizer’s piece on Parable of the Sower, where in it he criticizes the ideology of humans being the “peak” of biological species as this creates a narcissistic attitude towards other lifeforms. This is significant as this critical level of thinking around the subject of human’s and biological hierarchy being formed in “Weather” creates a message that the average person can easily approach this weird relationship that humans have with being evolutionally superior on a hierarchal level without having to be an ecocritical writer and researcher.

Continuing with Offill pushing towards ideas that has been argued in this course by the critical essayists that we’ve read from in this course, one that caught my attention was found on Page 55, where in it, its stated, “…there’s an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it’s a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brain refuses to take in what’s happening. This is called the incredulity response, ‘Those who live move…'” (Offill, Pg. 55) This piece of evidence connects to the reading that we’ve read from Clausen’s Georgic article; In the article, Clausen references Parable of The Sower, and how Lauren’s experience and diary could be used as a “survival guide” for anyone who finds themselves suffering the consequences of a rundown society at the expense of a disaster. The evidence used from Offill’s novel can be interpreted as some form of foreshadowing, where the advice is needed for an upcoming disaster that is unknown to both the characters and the reader.

In Conclusion, Weather’s ability to create a “common” or “average” model whether it be through characters or progression, develops a common ground between the readers and the critical essayists where they can approach to the same ideas about “cli-fi”, without the reader of the novel feeling alienated.

In the novel “Weather” written by Jenny Ofill, in the first chapter, we get the narrative from a first-person point of view about the everyday life of a librarian person (Lizzie) and what she goes through in her everyday life. Throughout the first chapter, we get sorts of information about the character and her family and her type of mindset, I would assume she is a pessimistic person based on her language and the way she articulates certain things, such as the conversation she had with Mr.Jimmy about the junkyard and she responded by saying that “I tell him one day those machines are going to come and crush all of us.” (pg.37) which from my understanding she seems to be in a bad mood. “You seem to identify down, not up. Why do you think that is?” (pg.15) This could indicate that this is the personality Lizzie has in this first chapter.

At some point in the novel Lizzie is at this conference with Sylvia who knew her and brought her to this conference that the whole thing is about the future and fearing what the future would potentially look like. “Somehow, I got seated halfway down the table from her. I’m trapped next to this young techno-optimist guy. He explains that current technology  will no longer seem strange when the generation who didn’t grow up with it finally ages out of the conversation.” (pg.38) The interesting thing about this dialogue is that I want to compare it to the real world because during the time the world was introduced to this new era of technology, there were many criticisms about it whether it was good or bad, and how it would impact the future. These were the people who didn’t grow up with technology and had conversations about it and it connects to reality because at some point people will normalize technology and implement it into their daily lives. In today’s world it’s the norm to see technology everywhere.

“His point is that eventually all those who are unnerved by what is falling away will be gone, and after that, there won’t be any more talk of what has been lost, only what has been gained.” (pg.38) In other words people who have this fear about the future because of the rise of technology and the potential outcome of it will be gone because they will be dead and the talks about technology whether it’s good or bad will be forgotten and the only things that are going to be talked is the outcomes that we gained from using technology. She sees it as something bad because if they are moving forward and forget what was behind then it will be something of the past and there is no going back to that time. I could think of it like she fears the future and rather stay in the past because she already experienced it and the future is unpredictable, no one knows what the future awaits, and whatever the outcome is positive or negative.

Despite everything, I enjoyed our discussions today: I love my job and students like y’all are like 98% of the reason why. The work we do together may feel irrelevant or hyper-specialized or not remunerative, etc. at times, but I fervently believe that learning to read rigorously and write searchingly is “equipment for living” (as Kenneth Burke said), and I’m grateful that we can work on it together this term (yes: I’m still learning how!).

Given our discussion of the macro picture today, you might be interested in an interview published in the NYT today between Linda Polgreen and Tressie McMillan Cottom. They’re both great writers, and Cottom is one of my heroes in academia now: her book LOWER ED is an ethnography of students’ lives at the non-selective and often exploitative for-profit colleges that an increasing share of working-class students started to attend in the 2000s and 2010s. She was one of them, and her brilliant analysis exposes the seductions and the cynicism of the model.

She’s smart as a whip about politics, and this piece has Polgreen and McMillan doing a post-mortem of Kamala’s campaign, but also taking a much broader view of where things might go from here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/opinion/presidential-election-2024-democrats.html

It’s paywalled, but remember that all CUNY folk get the NYT for free here.