Weather: A Hazy Novel

Weather: A Novel (2020)

By Jenny Offill

Alfred A. Knopf, 205 pages.

★

Have you ever seen any of those Woody Allen films in which Manhattan pseudo-intellectuals prattle on with great conviction about things they grasp only tangentially? Transfer the Lower East Side of the 1980s to Brooklyn Heights in the 2000s and you have the idea of Jenny Offill’s Weather. It has been widely hailed, but it will certainly be on my list of the worst books of 2020.

Offill plays off of two meanings of weather: metaphorical atmospheric shifts in social paradigms and “weathering” trauma. Those who like the book see it as a tale of our times from 9/11 to Trump and COVID. Those of us who dislike it see it as an unfocused expression of existential angst concluded with deus ex machina hope. To be sure, we live in trying times, much of which makes an appearance in the book: assortative mating, culture clashes, climate change, drug addiction, racism, struggles in the gig economy, and, worst of all, fear that the Anthropocene age is coming to an end. If you believe the last of these to be true, do you bother to get your teeth cleaned?

A young woman named Lizzie is at the center of Offill’s novel. She washed out of graduate school, much to the chagrin of her mentor, Sylvia, who pulled strings to secure her a place as a university librarian. Sylvia is (apparently) a social psychology professor who also has a podcast so popular that she is on the lecture trail and would like Lizzie to help her answer her mail. Lizzie does so, though she has a lot of her plate already. Her mother is ill, she and her husband Ben have an active son, Eli, whose needs must be balanced, and Lizzie’s brother Henry—to whom she is creepily attached—is an addict constantly trying to get straight. (As if marriage and a child of his own are good ways to accomplish that!)

These are the bare bones of the novel. Don’t expect flesh to appear. The book is written in small paragraphs, each set off from each other, and frequently disconnected. They appear more as diary entries, or perhaps real-time thoughts jotted in a journal. Some are aphorisms—though Pudd’nhead Wilson this isn’t—and others are fears real or projected. Many are also doomsday and disaster scenarios. Quite a few passages are beautifully written, but two major issues emerge. First, I can relate to running mental doomsday scenarios. I do it myself, but I am aware that they are fundamentally stupid, because the future immediate and hereafter is unknowable. Second, Offill’s literary device is by nature dissociative.

We know early one that Lizzie is smart, but a neurotic mess. She goes to Margot for meditation classes, which serve to give her bigger questions rather than helping her achieve Zen. She uses a private ride service she can’t afford because she worries she might be the only client of “Mr. Jimmy,” frets over a “doomed adjunct” slowly going squirrely, and avoids people who might engage or enrage her. She is a recluse who lives in her head, yet she somehow summons the energy to make survivalist plans with her husband. Alas, that’s about all she ever does. So what are reading, Wom[a]n on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown? Nope.  

The book has been praised for its dark humor, but I found it just plain annoying even though the issues Lizzie considers are important ones. Distinctions made between what is impossible and “barely possible” or unbearable and “barely bearable” are insufficient for an ending that feels more like resignation than resolution, and more barely connected than really connected. Any allusion to hope is akin to an Amazon delivery person who sprints to your door, drops the package on the porch, and jogs away. Weather is well written, but to what purpose? Like many of the novel’s detractors, the best I can say is that it’s short.

Rob Weir