Jenny Offil’s writing offers something genuinely different. I enjoyed her engagement with ‘ideas’, her elegance of expression and the flashes of humour but for me the fragmented structure didn’t work as well as Dept. Of Speculation - somehow that covered in a way this didn’t entirely, but this may have been because I was reading digitally where the crucial presence of blank space on the page is lost. I’d still recommend it.

My first Jenny Offill novel, and it lived up to the hype. I really enjoyed Offill's spare, observational, and often funny writing that reminded me of Rachel Cusk's style and Deborah Levy's sharp wit. The often surreal voice, created by cadences of poetically written observations that jump from passing thought to passing thought reminded me of Megan Hunter's novel The End We Start From. The themes of climate change, the environment and parenthood also overlapped here. I found the novel incredibly immersive but also page-turning and read it in just a few hours.

If you are living in a perpetual state of anxiety about the state of the world at the moment then this is the fiction for you. A beautifully written story full of keen observations on life in the 21st century, focused on climate change but touches on other important subjects too. This will make you feel less alone, and maybe even a little hopeful.

This unusual but incredibly relatable book perfectly depicts all the anxiety that fill today’s world - in this time of constant panic about one thing or the other, the protagonist tries to navigate through family and work life without losing her sanity. I’d definitely recommend it, although the style is a bit tricky to get used to. Nonetheless, I read it in a day, as the protagonists internal monologue really draws you in

raced through ‘Weather’, the second book from Jenny Offill. I haven’t read either of her others (Dept of Speculation and Last Things), but I’ll hunt them down after this!

Lizzie is a librarian juggling her son, husband, dog, brother, mother, the drug dealer in the apartment block and her mentor from afar. Everyone has their own problems, and all of them appear to bring them to Lizzie to work through.

The style and tone I’d describe as the book equivalent of a Terence Malick film – beautiful, fragmented and utterly sensible, if you can just follow the trail. I am a big fan of Malick’s films, although I know some people who don’t get on with their lack of narrative arc/plot structure – I don’t think you’d like Weather, if you don’t like these.

Lizzie’s inner monologue is raw and truthful, while avoiding the big issues in her life  - her brother is an addict who is co-dependent on her, and her husband is getting increasingly fed up. Set against a backdrop of close to the bone references about elections in the US, climate change and the feeling that we are edging towards the end of the world, and behaviours are increasingly erratic and irrational.

I really liked this, and hopefully I’ll get to see the author in my home town when she visits Norwich this month. Hosted by the National Centre for Writing in partnership with the Book Hive.

Thanks to Netgalley and Granta publications, as always!

Lizzie works as a librarian at a college, she is married, has a child and supports her mother and her recovering addict brother. Lizzie is the sort of person that others confide in. When she is offered a different role by an old acquaintance she starts answering mail sent into a podcast and starts to worry about her place in the world.
This is a very short book written in a series of short paragraph episodes which makes it very difficult to engage with at first. For most of the book, I was wondering why I was persisting but I found the rapid changes quite entrancing, a bit like a mind that flutters between thoughts. I still think this book is more style than substance but I actually quite enjoyed it by the end.

I've loved everything that Jenny Offill has written, and Weather is no exception. She has completely mastered the autofiction concept in a way that is only rivaled by Rachel Cusk. The difference is that the hallmark of Offill's writing its taught, pared-down character. Her prose is always pristine, every word perfectly chosen ever sentence and scene balanced. In Weather we meet Lizzie, a University Librarian who takes on work reading the correspondence for a friend and academic who presents a podcast on Climate Change. Through the lens of the climate emergency and the extreme reactions of both those who believe in or decry it Lizzie worries about the world her son will face. She perfectly captures the way that discussions of climate change intersect with the mundanities of everyday life and the underlying strain that constant concern can cause. Offill's style is so relatable because its fragmentation reflects the way issues, however pressing, drift in and out of our consciousness, how they combine themselves with memories and experiences and sometimes take on a life of their own. It's short, but perfectly formed.

Lizzie Benson’s life hasn’t exactly gone to plan, but she is doing the best she can. Having dropped out of university—to help her brother deal with his addiction—she secured a job as a university librarian without the requisite degree.

When Lizzie’s former mentor—Sylvia Liller, an academic who hosts a climate change podcast— offers her an additional job answering the emails she receives from listeners of Hell and High Water, Lizzie can’t bring herself to say no.

Lizzie soon finds herself taking on the worries of everyone who contacts Sylvia, which leads to a whole host of stress she could do without but can’t escape. As her climate anxiety grows, her marriage becomes more strained and Lizzie wonders what will be left of the world for her son to grow up in.

Told as a series of vignettes, Weather sees Lizzie navigate motherhood, marriage and codependent familial relationships, while also worrying about the climate crisis and life in Trump’s America. Offill is a skilled writer, with an ability to make the seemingly mundane utterly compelling.

Weather is the first Jenny Offill novel I have read and what a brilliant introduction it was. I’ve already added Dept. of Speculation and Last Things to my towering to-read pile.

I interviewed Ms. Offill and the interview ran in at least 11 newspapers and websites.

Jenny Offill talks ‘Weather,’ climate change and presidential elections ahead of Los Angeles book event

https://www.ocregister.com/2020/02/18/jenny-offill-talks-weather-climate-change-and-presidential-elections-ahead-of-los-angeles-book-event/

Thank you to Netgalley for this advanced reader's copy. Stunning story, deep and insightful. Left me wanting more.

A jewel of a book. I wish the publishing industry today was more open to short, stylistically taut novels that defy plot conventions. More impressionistic than plotted and more idea-driven than character-driven, Weather is a meditation and lamentation on the fears we all face in this era of extreme climate change.

I found this book not the easiest to read although many of the things written I could see in our world as it is today. Lizzie is a librarian and obviously sees and hears a lot through her bird’s eye view of students, professors etc and she takes it all on board with a clear eye as to what she thinks the world is all about and where it may be going. She has a family and a brother who needs care and attention and it comes through the narrative that she is balancing many plates in the air and possibly to the detriment of her own survival and then taking on answering emails from people with anxieties makes her feel more vulnerable. I can’t say I enjoyed this book and have very mixed feelings about it but maybe if I had a political bone in my body I may have enjoyed it more. I can see, however, that this book would appeal to many people but not me I am afraid to say

Weather by Jenny Offill disappointed me immensely. It is a series of disjointed, fragmented paragraphs which quickly becomes very boring and tedious to plod through. I read the entire (short) book in the hopes that it might reveal something insightful, or create a meaningful connection with me, but alas, it did not.

#netgalley #jennyoffill #weather #grantapublications

[Review first published in New Scientist.]

Climate anxiety is no stranger to fiction. For decades, writers have confronted the future of a warming planet, through speculative dystopias such as J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. More recently, John Lanchester’s 2019 novel The Wall depicts a near future in which Britain has erected a barrier around its coastline to keep climate refugees out.

Jenny Offill’s new novel, Weather, adds to the growing subset of fiction concerned with the impact of climate change. Set in about 2016, the book is written in the first person, in fragments of narration, dialogue and information.

The form is similar to her 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation. But where the previous book examines the uncertain future of a marriage, Weather navigates the psychological burden of an impending climate crisis.

Weather focuses on individual lives and in this regard it has similarities to social realist novels such as Barbara Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behaviour.

The book is narrated by Lizzie, a librarian, who details her preoccupations at work and home with a frankness that is often amusing. There are conversations with and worries about her husband, son and her brother, who is recovering from an unspecified drug addiction.

Lizzie begins supplementing her income by answering emails for Sylvia, a former academic turned environmental futurist, whose popular podcast, Hell and High Water, has turned her into a regular on the speaking circuit.

The podcast listeners are intrigued by the usual environmental and technological catchphrases: the Anthropocene, how to save the bees, surveillance capitalism, the internet of things.

“I swear the hippie letters are a hundred times more boring than the end-timer ones,” Lizzie notes. “They are all about composting toilets and water conservation and electric cars and how to live lightly on the earth while thinking ahead for seven generations.” Later, when Lizzie joins Sylvia on travels, she notes that “people are really sick of being lectured to about the glaciers”.

Here Offill hits on a perennial challenge for environmentalists and journalists: how does one adequately convey the gravity of the climate crisis without desensitising people on the one hand, and overwhelming them with despair on the other?

Lizzie and Sylvia both tilt gradually towards the latter, developing a sense of helplessness about impending climate collapse. There are several mentions of the end of the world. “There’s no hope anymore, only witness,” believes Sylvia.

Lizzie becomes obsessed with doomsday prepping and survival skills, learning how to how to make toothpaste and catch fish with a shirt. She and her husband run through what they would need for building a “doomstead” property.

The book is most powerful in its articulation of ordinary anxieties. “I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action,” Lizzie muses. The fatalism of its characters reads as a myopic retreat, one that privileges the individual over collective survival.

Rather than be spurred into action by gloomy news – “New York City will begin to experience dramatic, life-altering temperatures by 2047” and so on – Lizzie and Sylvia both withdraw from civic engagement at a time when action would be most productive.

Increasingly, the word “apocalyptic” comes to mind when we think of extreme weather events related to climate change, such as the such as the Australian bushfires or the swarms of locusts that have plagued eastern Africa.

Offill’s Weather makes one consider the inevitable and accelerating encroachment of climate change on the foundations of what we consider normal life. It is a reminder that in a time of crisis, when climate emergency threatens to worsen into catastrophe, inaction is a moral failure.

This book is very much in the style of Dept. of Speculation (Jenny Offill's previous novel) – a style I described in my review of that book as elliptical and aphoristic style.

Offil said in many interviews around Dept. of Speculation that she enjoys wandering the non-fiction aisles of university libraries, pulling books and random, and noting any facts which catch her interest and she can use in her books.

Here she embraces that idea by making her main character a University librarian – Lizzie.

Lizzie gets a side job supporting her ex research supervisor - a climate change podcaster Sylvia. She accompanies her to summits and meetings, meeting the super-rich and their response to the climate emergency, a world of rewilding, technological singularity, transhumanism, floating cities, geo-engineering. She also answers her emails and post, which in turn introduces her to a different approach to the same topic – the world of survival hacks, doomsteads, doomsday preppers.

Lizzie’s marriage falters a little – due to her excessive involvement (at one stage she takes an “enmeshment” test) with the life of her addict brother, which takes a more dramatic turn as he struggles with being a new-father. Her insistence on taking on the burden of her brother, is I think reflected in her views on climate change – taking on the burdens of the human race.

“I let my brother choose the movie for once, but then it’s so stupid I can barely watch it. In the movies he likes there is always some great disaster about to happen and only one unlikely person who can stop it.”

And climate change, in keeping with the book’s style is addressed elliptically and aphoristically, some examples:

“First they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not coral”

“It is important to be on the alert for “the decisive moment,” says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.”

“My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay,”

Of the anthropological driver of climate change:

“Sometimes I bring her books to read. She likes mysteries, she told me. Regular-type mysteries. But this last one I gave her was no good, she says. It was all jumbled up. In it, the detective investigated the crime, tracked down every clue, interviewed every possible suspect, only to discover that he himself was the murderer. You don’t say.”

Of her own attempts to process the emergency:

“The disaster psychologist explains that in times of emergency the brain can get stuck on a loop, trying to find a similar situation for comparison.”

Of the difficulty of understanding the time frame over which climate change is emerging:

A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but (the turtle) couldn’t help them. ‘It all happened so fast,’ he said.”

It seems almost impossible to review this book – without comparing and contrasting it to Lucy Ellmans’s Goldsmith Prize winning, Booker shortlisted “Ducks, Newburyport”.

Both feature an American female wife and mother as a narrator, both focus almost obsessively on environmental issues, on the election of Trump and what the two together say about modern America, both obsessed that this is the worst-of-times (in direct contradiction to almost every possible statistical measure that can be used), both mix the profound with the mundane, both interleave trivia with domesticity and with world events.

However whereas Ellmann has a comprehensive, all-inclusive, stream-of-consciousness style, representing the narrator’s though process, with nothing edited or filtered; by contrast Offill’s style is all about the filter and edit – it is a book which has been edited down to almost nothing, where much of the action takes place in the spaces between paragraphs.

I am not clear which book I enjoyed the most. This is a much easier and more intellectually stimulating read, but also a more ephemeral and insubstantial one.

At the end of Jenny Offill’s new book, Weather (the first of her novels that I have read), there is a link to a website (www.obligatorynoteofhope.com). In an interview with Esquire magazine, Offill says

”I launched the Obligatory Note of Hope website. Much of it came from thinking about the novel and how to write the novel, and then when I was finished, there were all these resources I had come across. When I tried to fit them in the novel, they capsized the book. The website has tips for trying times about how people have survived different dark periods in history. It’s everything from wartime recipes to what people read during different periods of disaster to social science about what it means to collectively join with others.”

In Weather, university librarian Lizzie takes on a side job answering questions sent in to her erstwhile mentor, Sylvia, who has a podcast that generates queries about the end of the world which could come about either by the Rapture or by climate change. At the same time, she is attempting to support her brother through his drug issues and becoming a new father and navigating a potential crisis in her own marriage. It’s a heady mix that leads to a lot of interesting observations and plenty of comedy moments: on comedy Offill says (interview with The Observer):

”I feel like it is one of the things that keeps people afloat during tough times and you see it in communities that have been traditionally marginalised - that there is a strong way of talking about absurdity”

For me, some of the jokes fell a bit flat, but that is a minor quibble and probably more related to my poor sense of humour than anything else. Lizzie’s new job answering emails for Sylvia gradually begins to take over and her worries about climate change and “prepping” come to the fore. This is where the power of the book lies.

The book is full of white space and this is where the action takes place. What we read is fragments that jump from story thread to story thread, that include snippets of information or jokes, that build the picture. For the first few pages, I felt that I was back in the world of 2019’s “Ducks, Newburyport” by Lucy Ellmann, but it quickly becomes clear that this is something different where thoughts are filtered and the narrative is carefully structured (as opposed to the unfiltered narrative in Ellmann’s work, although that is also carefully put together) to lead the reader through but with the expectation that the reader will “fill in the blanks” and put the pieces together.

The website link at the end of the book is appropriate and helpful. The novel itself presents us with the issue of “climate dread” and shows us some notes of hope, so jumping into the “real world” at the end to see practical ways organisations and individuals are responding takes the reader a step further on the journey.

Author interviews:
https://observer.com/2020/02/jenny-offill-on-weather-and-struggling-to-be-social-interview/
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a30856598/jenny-offill-weather-interview-climate-change-singularity-rapture/

I am grateful to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

We live in strange times. Apocalyptic fires in Australia. Election after election where strongmen like Trump, Johnson & Bolsonaro prevail. Strong winds, floods, hurricanes. No snow in London for years now. A terrifying virus closing down schools & cities. People wearing masks. Climate change- now renamed climate emergency. We yearn to avoid the news.

Yet we get up in the morning. Make our coffee, pick up a book, post on Instagram, talk to friends, take our kids to school, go to work. We focus on the tiny & everyday, with doomsday scenarios increasingly forming the background noise of our lives.

In 2020 I have decided to read books on climate change; this was decided in a glib moment (which I half regret) of me thinking I should face my fears. Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’ became a part of my personal climate change reading challenge unexpectedly. I didn’t predict how it would make me feel.

With fragmentary, spikey paragraphs that will be familiar to those who loved her 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, Offill offers a unique take on climate change & Donald Trump’s America. It took me a while to feel at home in her writing, but once I did, I settled in & turned the pages greedily. I haven’t read anything as powerful in describing our current moment- our climate anxiety, our political anxiety, our efforts to manage our daily, mundane lives despite with all this around us.

There is though nothing heroic or relieving here. I hugely admire Jenny Offill for her achievement: in short perfectly formed snapshots, she captures our lives so accurately. Yet ‘Weather’ filled me with dread and deep sadness for ourselves & our limited choices, & for the generations to follow.

Although I read Offill’s novel “Dept. of Speculation” over five years ago during one joyously long reading session on a plane, it stands out in my mind as so stylistically unique with a voice that seamlessly blends humour with poignant critiques on love and modern life. Her new novel “Weather” uses a similar style of narrative while engaging more overtly with current politics and social anxiety. Rather than a linear story we’re presented with clipped sections of text surrounding the life of Lizzie Benson, a librarian and mother living on the east coast of America. Brief scenes from her life are interspersed with paragraphs from journals or jokes. Together these form an impression (rather than a complete portrait) of her life and a sense of being in the time proceeding and immediately after Trump’s election. Hanging over the book is its characters’ impending sense of doom and a need to develop survival strategies for what they assume to be an inevitable disaster.

I love how close I came to feel with Lizzie even though the author consciously leaves out so many specifics and details about her life. It’s not exactly like stream of consciousness writing, but more like snapshots of experience that build to a wider worldview. She wryly notes encounters with some patrons at the library with their oddball questions or requests – this felt very true to life especially after reading about the kinds of encounters librarians must endure on a daily basis in Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book”. Throughout the book Lizzie will often recount facts or explain the background behind certain things. When she's asked at one point “How do you know all this?” she responds “I’m a fucking librarian.”

She also describes moments with her family from tender encounters to points of conflict. Her son might casually make a dismissive, insulting remark about her or there might be a description of her recovering drug addict brother Henry’s alarming erratic behaviour. Other times she'll reflect on the puzzling nature of relationships: “Funny how when you’re married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you’re anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.” Just a small snippet of dialogue or brief detail in this novel can unfold in a way that left me feeling I’d read a much longer and more fleshed out scene. It’s an impressive technique that compresses experience down to what’s most essential and impactful.

It's interesting to compare this novel to “Ducks, Newburyport”, one of my favourite books from last year. They both capture something essential about our modern day experience: how opinions are filtered through the media to form a consensus without proper debate or facts and how a profusion of news about global issues leads to deep-felt private anxiety. Lizzie has internalized this so much she often compares reality to the structure of a disaster movie and wryly notes how everyone assumes our planet must be soon abandoned: “Today NASA found seven new Earth-size planets. So there’s that.” But where Ellmann's novel brilliantly embraces the endless barrage of her protagonist's thoughts and the hilarious peculiarities of her internal logic, Offill presents a skilfully abbreviated view of one woman's reality as she navigates an increasingly absurd world. “Weather” is such a brilliant and accomplished novel.

A storm is rallying in Jenny Offill's latest novel, Weather. Trump, climate change, intense family dramas are all packing into this short novel.

I loved Dept. of Speculation back in 2015 so much so that I can remember when I was reading it when I gulped it up in one sitting and it was even one of my books of the year. So when I heard a new novel was coming out I was really happy and also nervous because what if it wasn't as good. Well, spoiler alert to the rest of this review - it was bloody brilliant.

Following the style of Dept. of Speculation, Weather is told in short sharp snippets, playing with the traditional novel form, leaving the reader to piece together the fragmented thoughts of Lizzie's life as we delve into her family dramas and paranoia of the turmoil in America. The push and pull of denial of the way society is changing, the secrets and lies we tell ourselves and to our families to stay in a comfort state. This book is bursting at the seams with great prose and themes.

The galloping pace pulls the reader into currents of political and environmental tornadoing through this book as Offill delves into American's current political environment. Darkly funny, she weaves in this sense of dread of the way society is progressing alongside Lizzie's stormy life.

Not only is she a librarian but also an accidental therapist to her addict brother, helping strangers, answering dilemmas for strangers. At times, I got the sense she was using this as a way of not having to deal with the tension in her own home. Her husband and her son fade into the background at times as she takes on the responsibility of keeping her brother on the right track, and helping out strangers from the library.

I loved the dry, funny style of writing and the gaps in the narrative, leaving the reader to fill the gaps. Not only is this a book about family life, and the push and pull of loyalties but is also political, giving a window into society as it is right now.

I know that it's only February but I feel like this is going to end up on my books of the year for 2020. Weather is available from your favourite bookshop so go and buy it or borrow it from the library!

Thank you to Netgalley for sending me an ebook of Weather.

This book has themes of climate anxiety, addiction, and more. The format is different and I can tell it won't be for everyone. I think it really goes with the subjects. It's written from the protagonist's POV and I enjoyed it a lot.
Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.