Jenny Offill’s Weather , shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, asks a single, all-important question: How do we channel our existential dread into action? In an online interview with Joe Dunthorne, Offill says that “action is the antidote to dread”. She seems to exemplify this belief in Weather : We are not only asked to imagine a better world but also to put it together “block by block”.
Weather wants us to embrace the need to act, to step up, at least to try. It is at times solipsistic, too fragmented, but its self-awareness is sobering. It congeals the peculiarities of the current moment: of coexisting crises, continuities between politics, and a life that isn’t single-issue any more. It is a multi-layered, nuanced portrait of the inner experience of being at the heart of a rumbling world while accommodating within oneself the crisis of living in this moment of the ‘holocene’.
Crowded margins
At one level, the novel is domestic fiction. Lizzie Benson, the protagonist, is a librarian without a “proper degree for it”. She is also a “fake shrink” to her brother, who is in recovery. As the novel progresses we are introduced to other fragments of her life — the banality of the quotidian, her tense relationships, the challenges of motherhood and financial stress.
At another level, Weather is a subtle portrait of a crumbling anthropocentric world of which the domestic life of Lizzie is a part.
But these are bare bones of a plot: remnants of a first draft overwritten many times over. It is remindful of Walter Benjamin’s comment on Proust’s painful proofreading habits: “The galleys always went back covered with marginal notes, but not a single misprint had been corrected; all available space had been used for fresh text.” Offill’s margins speak of burnt erasers and worn-out pencils.
Was it a disaster?
An important secondary character is Sylvia Liller, referred to as the “enlightened one” in the opening lines. Lizzie’s former mentor, Sylvia is an academic who delivers public talks on climate change. Sylvia hires Lizzie to
respond to her emails. Through Sylvia, we receive snippets that draw the novel out of its domestic space into a larger, complex context. For instance, somewhere in the novel, we have Sylvia describing the period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if there truly was a disaster. “That’s the name for what we’re doing,” Sylvia says, referring to the tumultuous current moment of escalating climate crisis.
This is where the novel’s splintered style becomes even more crucial, because to run a linear teleological narrative would be to placate, to offer a solution, which does not exist. Weather , with its spindly sentences branching out into multiple digressions,does none of this — it simply exists. It survives. For the most part, that is.
While reading Weather I was constantly thinking of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights : a novel that is as fragmented and wispy as Weather. But where the discontinuous texture breathes life into Sleepless Nights , in Weather there is something that stops it from being truly alive.
Weather runs faster than its ideas, missing out on the granular intricacies of the very ideas it claims to speak to. Towards the end it seems the novel suddenly wants to serve as a survival kit, with Lizzie’s life made into an example. That feels forced, agenda-driven, a gesture towards an easy solution, which it had resisted so far. Perhaps Weather ’s flaw and strength both lie in its ambition, its keenness to leave the reader with a narrative that feels relatable.
For a book without order, Weather is replete with lists: “prepper acronyms”, “tips for dealing with problem patrons”, baby names, and so on. Are these lists parodying the human obsession with order in a world bereft of it? Or is Weather dealing with its own anxiety by sputtering out these tiny lists? Would imagining the worst give us a guideline to surviving the end of the world?
At the end, we see Lizzie moving towards chaos, seeking action instead of denial. The novel’s perceptiveness is infectious. It moved me to look outward, outside at the world that is in smithereens as we speak. It is perhaps not the survival novel that we expected or even needed but the one that we have, and I will take it.
The reviewer is a lawyer and a student of Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi.
Weather; Jenny Offill, Granta Books, ₹615.26 (Kindle price)
Published - June 20, 2020 04:00 pm IST
