Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do ... fragmented structure composed of short bursts of mundane intensity that make me think of Dalí’s animal sketches, in which a few spare ink strokes evoke the essence of each beast ... Offill’s writing is shrewd on the question of whether intense psychic suffering heightens your awareness of the pain of others, or makes you blind to it ... part of the brilliance of Offill’s fiction is how it pushes back against this self-deception ... If I responded more strongly to Dept. of Speculation than to Weather, it might be a testament to the narrative dilemma the new novel is reckoning with: the scale of its ambition, despite its brevity, in its attempt to tell a story about climate change that carries the same visceral force as our private emotional dramas — that is, in fact, inseparable from them ... Offill’s whittled narrative bursts are apt vessels for the daily experience of scale-shifting they document — the vertigo of moving between the claustrophobia of domestic discontent and the impossibly vast horizon of global catastrophe ... something like an inverted X-ray: a narrative that illuminates not the obvious bones of the story but its unexpected details; not the bold lines of your femurs but the detritus in your pockets — the crumpled receipts, the pacifier dropped on the sidewalk, the key whose lock you can’t remember ... Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun.
... tiny in size and immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible ... A narrator and a novel that hum with anxiety and pulse with dread are nonetheless hilarious, warm, and lovable. Both ruefully mordant and strangely consoling, Weather is at once brutal in its unsparing honesty and utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence. It radiates with the beleaguered yet buoyant optimism, the luminous integrity, of a supple and fearless writer.
The novel’s pacing sometimes teases us into concluding it plotless, and Offill threatens to relegate Lizzie to stock-character status—a figurine in some toy rendition of the white liberal world we expect to see portrayed in a particular strain of contemporary fiction. But she complicates this reading of Lizzie with her longstanding, subterranean commentary on womanhood and mothering ... the dance of Offill’s language is also on display ... Lizzie’s constant care-taking offers not only a subtle critique of gendered labor; it is also a crucial component of Weather’s narrative momentum ... The new novel’s paragraphs, too, are short and pithy—what seem at first like aphoristic standalones constellate into some larger meaning. Reading Weather is a constant process of revelation: the 'point' of any one vignette isn’t always clear, at least not until many pages later, when another paragraph provides some telling detail, winking back to the first ... Ultimately, though, Weather neither casts judgment nor parades as some grand call to action. It articulates instead collective anguish for a sick planet and situates this preemptive mourning within the larger matrix of systemic issues ... Indeed, Weather’s own lack of resolve serves to illuminate the importance of sitting with these emotions, suggesting that they might be confronted communally.
Like a sort of literary shadow box, the novel collects images and instances from the past few years, with the 2016 election as a clarifying point in this picture of a fraught and fragmenting world. Again, there are jokes, factoids and quotes, as well as a healthy dose of survivalist lore ... one of the wonders of Offill’s writing that her light touch lets us glimpse the very real dread lurking underneath ... Henry, in his fragile state, makes all the more abstract existential fears that course through Weather intimate, immediate and sharply, sometimes comically, real ... The note of hope, obligatory though it may be, comes through.
Jenny Offill broke through the funk of a 15-year gap between her first and second novels with Dept. of Speculation (2014), a wonderful series of witty, plangent short dispatches about marriage, motherhood, and thwarted aspirations ... Offill's new novel, Weather, takes a similarly clever diary-like tack, but it's even better — darkly funny and urgent, yet more outwardly focused, fueled by a growing preoccupation with the scary prospect of a doomed earth ... Offill's signature achievement here is to capture the angst specific to our particular moment in time — the rising tide of anxiety, especially in New York City, about a world threatened by climate change and the ascension of right-wing strongmen, which deepens after the 2016 election ... This potent, appealing little book is about how we weather this sense of doom — with humor, incredulity, panic, disaster preparedness, or, best of all, action ... Offill is a master of the glancing blow, and her portrait of life in Brooklyn is the stuff of comedy series ... Wade into Weather. It will only take a few hours of your precious time.
... brilliant ... Weather holds its own with the strongest examples of the new non-speculative climate fiction. It has the feel of a new classic, the kind of book that future humans will read in order to figure out what people were thinking in the early decades of the 21st century, when they knew they were creating a crisis and yet were doing nothing to rein it in ... The success of Weather is the result, first, of her impeccable sentences: spare on the surface but dense with meaning. When you have been spending time with Offill’s prose, all other sentences seem suddenly baggy, embarrassingly rambling, self-indulgent, imprecise. On the one hand, I wish Weather were longer because I would have liked to spend more time with its intelligent narrator, allowing her to select endless snippets of wisdom and foolishness from the vast library of her mind. On the other hand, Offill’s restraint is admirable: it must have taken a great deal of effort to avoid writing a clunky book by commenting on every paratext she selected. Each sentence that made it into a book is a perfectly cut and polished jewel ... but Weather would have been stronger if she also acknowledged her good fortune to go into the storm as an educated white American with a professional salary ... Offill does not impose a set of morals on its readers; instead, she instructs by literally teaching us how to feed ourselves and keep ourselves warm when the infrastructure of modern civilization fails. By caring for others, Offill shows us how we might, in an ever-darkening world, create a little bit of light.
... a pliable, resistant novel ... Many readers (I am one) fall hard for Offill’s spare, fractured method ... Offill writes as if from the long historical perspective. Her end-times narrative is both desperate and funny ... Lizzie is such a charming empath, her sensibility so offbeat, and her dread of climate catastrophe so real ... Jenny Offill’s wonderful book ends with its own plea to close distances: 'The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.'
... a relatively small book with a large impact ... Offill’s ability to layer meaning is on full display in this novel. Nothing is exactly as it reads, nuance underlies nearly every carefully crafted line ... most prescient, however, is Offill’s scathing, often farcical, observation and probing of society at large ...The most remarkable aspect of this book to me is the structure ... Offill relays the story primarily in brief chunks, short paragraphs, that are punctuated by tightly woven sentences. In this way, each scene is given weight and meaning, one building upon the next as the story unfolds. It is unique and enthralling, the perfect format for a story which could not be told any other way.
...remarkable and resonant ... Those who have read Offill’s 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation...will recognize the author’s style, a pastiche of pithy scenes, jokes, adages and ephemera. Like her contemporaries Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk and Jenny Erpenbeck, Offill eschews traditional storytelling in order to pursue deeper meaning and coherence ... the rhythm of her composition invites you to make your own segues from waltz to jig, hustle to mambo ... Offill’s genius lies in tightly sewing together the small moments that make up a particular life and the huge questions that keep us all awake at night ... The most memorable bits of the book may be the threads that Offill leaves dangling, orphan snippets and jokes you can’t help laughing at.
Jenny Offill’s aptly titled Weather is a dispatch...vacillating between gallows and humor, almost always living in the space between both. But, though concerned with topical matters, it is not exactly what was once called a social novel. There’s neither much plot nor much character to speak of ... this novel is propelled by voice, not machinery. The narrator’s mood is, in a pleasing way, internally contradictory. She is full of anxiety, but she arrives at such a beautifully laconic mode of expression that the effect is lulling rather than unsettling ... There is an elegance even in her more depressing insights[.]
Our looming climate disaster finds its witty, anxious, definitive poem in Weather, a slim but sharp novel thickly layered in post-Trump malaise ... Offill embraces satirical current references, risking glibness, but doesn’t rely on sound bites. She writes with soul and pursues the truth, gearing up for the end of the world.
Offill is in total control here, and all the asides, jokes and Q&As reflect the fraying state of Lizzie’s mind as her concerns over the climate crisis, the Trump administration, pernicious algorithms and other man-made threats intensify. Lizzie’s predicament, and the real question at the heart of this novel, is how she is supposed to prepare for the end of the world when day-to-day life itself is so maddening ... Weather is too sharp a book to allow for pessimism or apathy. There is simply too much to be done, and there are too many people to care for and about, the novel argues, to not work through our deepest fears and fight our way past this crisis.
As with her previous novel, the paragraphs in Weather are each a kind of koan, some short, some long, all of them containing a piece of central, organising wisdom. Penelope Fitzgerald was the queen of the innocuously devastating aphorism; Offill has inherited her crown. Again and again her sentences resonate powerfully, drawing you in with their humour before sideswiping you with their veracity ... we construct a whole from the pieces Offill gives us, and find that we hold in our hands a truly remarkable novel, perhaps the most powerful portrait of Trump’s America yet.
Feeling worried about climate change has now been recognised as a legitimate mental health issue. If you suffer from it, you might find Jenny Offill's excellent third novel tips you over the edge ... Using her characteristic, epigrammatic prose style that's both jittery and deadpan at the same time, Offill presents us with a wryly funny state-of-the-nation novel wired to the hilt with a dread that'll infect your dreams.
Formally, Weather is closer to Dept. of Speculation, Offill’s second novel and the break-out critical hit she published in 2014. Both novels intersperse narrative momentum with anecdotes, quotes, lists, and, in the case of Weather, a series of email Q&As. It abandons traditional storytelling just as the arc of humanity is hitting its denouement ... Weather isn’t a piece of climate propaganda or the equivalent of a proselytizing nutter come knocking on your door ... despite increasingly dire climate news, the worry is a restricted emotion, kept closeted as if contagious. Weather asks the question, what if we all just let it spill out, and revelled in the relief that comes with acceptance?
Offill introduces the world with ease. Her style seems effortless. She is a wizard at letting the story tell itself and knows exactly how much detail to give the reader. If there was a motto for her writing it might be: never confusing, never dull ... The sections on marriage and motherhood are full of unsentimental, astute observations ... There is perhaps a slightness to this storyline that was not apparent in Dept of Speculation. Both novels are slender and both use the same formal invention where snippets of conversations, jokes, various media and correspondence combine to an impressive whole ... If there is a negative to Weather, it is that we are left wanting more from all of these characters. By turns profound and hilarious, it is the kind of book where you don’t want to miss a line ... To read a Jenny Offill novel is to come away feeling more engaged with the world and a little less alone.
If the times are unprecedented, how much can you really expect from a novelist? Accepting the premise, critics often praise such books for their ability to depict reality rather than for their ability to respond to it, critique it, or engage with it. Representation—and its attractive counterpart, relatability—are celebrated as achievements rather than acknowledged as the baseline from which a novelist should begin her work ... Offill has said that her books involve extensive research, taking years to finish, but their fragmentation and plain, leading style are fundamentally passive. Every sentence is potentially meaningful; it’s the reader, activated by dread, who ends up searching for clues, chasing the narrative like a spy, or a conspiracy theorist. Lizzie’s observations are often amusing, but there’s no reason they should be organized as a novel and not as a particularly literate Twitter feed ... In replicating the experience of being online, Offill conveys the paranoiac mood of the present, but she ignores the strength of the novel as a mode, which is its ability to reflect a mind that is contained in a body that exists in the world, a mind that may be hyperaware of its time but is not actually trapped in it.
... an anxious work concerned with the 'disaster imaginary' ... Weather collages together not so much a world on fire, but an atmosphere of smoke ... It’s funny because it’s so casual, but so too are the now-quotidian feelings of dread and anxiety ... a paranoid style of thinking, as if the paragraphs were newspaper clippings pinned to a wall and the reader is stringing together uncanny connections ... By braiding apocalyptic thoughts with everyday life, Offill shows how susceptible—and adaptable—we are to fear.
... glorious, dizzying, disconcerting and often laugh-out-loud hysterical, in all the meanings of that last word ... while the weather may be unpredictable, history has a way of bending toward repetition before it arcs back to justice ... Which is the brilliance of Weather: We see Lizzie moving repeatedly through the same precise landscapes, interacting with the same exact people, her world and her supporting characters fixed like a sitcom’s standing sets and background regulars. The only thing that changes is the collective consciousness, so that safe spaces turn dangerous, dangerous spaces turn hum-drum and thus old relationships get upended, as if an asteroid is hurtling toward the planet and nothing really matters anymore ... both satire and a precise critique of what means to live in this time, when every day we’re besieged by worst-case scenarios.
... equal parts humor and dread. At the crux of the book is an emotional landscape that is rich and verdant but surrounded by a desolate, burning world ... In its first half, the novel feels meandering. Scenes are short and unconventional. It takes sharp attention to infer where Lizzie is, to whom she is speaking, and how the scene connects to one earlier in the book. Often, the narrator’s thoughts don’t seem to connect. But this style rewards patience: If you’re content to ponder Lizzie’s philosophical queries and make the most of her observations, you’ll be rewarded with a joyful sense of slowing down. Weather asks us observe our own thought processes in our daily lives. The pacing picks up in the second half ... The novel seems an answer to Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 book of nonfiction Hope in the Dark ... Weather takes the broad historical strokes of Hope and shrinks them to the size of a woman’s life in her neighborhood.
The book is most powerful in its articulation of ordinary anxieties ... The fatalism of its characters reads as a myopic retreat, one that privileges the individual over collective survival ... 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.
In this novel, the whittled pieces of Offill’s fiction are small drawers in a cabinet of curiosities. Sometimes, she hones them further and their lines almost break under the weight of their freight. Yet when the line breaks, there is the possibility of poetry ... Kazim Ali [writes] about the magic of the poetic line: ‘Something exists in the here and now with no dependence on before or after.’ This is the space Offill observes, collecting shards and slivers of questioning ... Weather is the walking mirror that has tripped. A reader might step over its beautiful splinters, only to find a fine piece working its way deeper into the skin, or popping out, later. Auden wrote of Yeats: ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’. Weather might carry a hope that its splinters hurt readers into some kind of action ... As Offill writes the novel of end-times, she is also writing the end of the novel. And yet, this sharp gem suggests that there may be something beyond the novel. Weather is terrifying, even as it opens into poetry, consolation flickering ... Offill’s quick-quipping, barely hopeful, almost-broken novel observes consolation trashed and fragmented, but still, somehow, emitting its light, still murmuring responses to unanswerable questions, even as its lines can barely bear this weight.
In 2014, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation was greeted as a new sort of writing. Like Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Karl Ove Knausgård’s Boyhood, published in English in the same year, this was autofiction: a novel that blurred the boundaries with memoir ... Offill’s book was dramatically pared down to taut, tight paragraphs trapped in the present tense, each packed with quirky observation and fantastic one liners. It was sold as 'not so much a novel as the X-ray of one'. Six years later, Knausgård and Cusk have finished their sequences of novels; autofiction is so well established that it is being attacked for its solipsism; and Offill has finally sculpted another book, this time in even shorter paragraphs ... Because Lizzie seems so unnervingly close to us, and because the bad news is seen glancingly, the way we might look at the sun, all of this feels real and near ... there is no comforting fiction in this book at all, only terrifying facts about ecological disaster and encroaching fascism. Perhaps all our clever chat, like all Lizzie’s talk, will get us nowhere. It’s an alarming prospect – reading Weather made me grind my teeth at night, just like its narrator – but it is certainly a brilliant exemplar for the autofictional method. Offill pulls us in close in order to make us worry about things outside us; mirrors the self to show us what we are selfishly ignoring.
Jenny Offill’s Weather is a novel about living at the end of the world, which is to say that it is a novel about being alive right now ... That question is nearly impossible to confront without despair, but Offill’s form allows her to get closer than most writers. Those tiny units of story work like Zen koans: they are so opaque, and yet so deadpan and unflinching, that as they accumulate, we find ourselves brought closer and closer to the truth we could not bear to look at if it were presented to us head-on. We come so close that Weather feels honest and unsparing in a way few other novels about climate change have managed.
... is written in carefully composed vignettes and features a self-aware protagonist with a wry sense of humor and keen eye for irony ... considers climate change from the point of view of someone not yet experiencing nor immediately at risk of its most severe effects—all relayed with a mix of pathos and gallows humor ... Offill smartly anchors her story in conflicts that have little to do with climate change, but which complicate the way she sees both ... Often more than any single grand idea, the pleasure of reading Offill is in her supreme attention to language and how precisely she unfolds her narratives. She never gives more than what is needed, and what she gives, for all her protagonist’s wryness, is often startlingly beautiful ... If Weather lacks the perfect focus of Speculation, it’s a matter of scale. The latter considers the end of a marriage; the former, the end of the world. What’s a little infidelity compared to that? ... Offill creeps. Plot is a slow and steady accumulation, akin to the frog-in-boiling-water metaphor so often used to illustrate climate change ... but by novel’s end, you will know how to start a fire with a gum wrapper and a battery. If learning such a skill is the unfortunate result of the narrator’s dread, then writing this affecting, witty, sometimes hopeful novel is the author’s. It may not prove as useful in a catastrophe, but like so many things we now take for granted, we are lucky to have it.
The novel’s warm yet depressive, gently apocalyptic tone—just like its sinewy form—is similar to that of Dept. of Speculation, but the new book carries with it an additional, grim implication that the world outside may be catching up with its sensibility ... the entire texture of everyday living is infused with the mood of political and ecological disaster ... Offill’s frequent jokes about depression, featured in both works, here unmask themselves as what they maybe always were: reminders of how nearly impossible it is to learn to live with things as they are.
... entertains, with humor and urgency ... In a fresh angle for climate literature, Offill has neatly framed the problem of prioritizing lives ... At the mournful heart of this otherwise light-footed novel lies a recognition of the limits of care: you can’t save everything, love everyone. You have to choose, and soon ... Lizzie’s more explicit jabs offer welcome comic relief, but they can on occasion feel too expected—the usual suspects have been rounded up. Nevertheless, Weather is an important reminder that 'domestic' fiction is eminently suited to addressing social and ecological, as well as familial and personal, apocalypse. Offill has agilely coordinated many of the forces hastening destruction and counterbalanced them with a parent’s visceral, helpless anxiety for the next generation.
... [the protagonist's] wry, restlessly buzzing first-person voice engagingly echoes that of her predecessor. The book’s episodic narrative, with its grab bag of anecdotes, observations and obliquely relevant factoids, is similarly dry and austere. Yet somehow Weather still feels like a movingly original book ...By calling her book Weather, Ms. Offill efficiently conveys her simultaneous preoccupations with big and often dramatic ideas (death, climate change, the longevity of marital love) and small, everyday concerns (sad underwear, the delight of a newly sharpened pencil, the guilt of sitting on a crowded bus) ... what makes this book readable, and not merely bleakly nauseating, is Ms. Offill’s appreciation for the ways in which life still pushes on, in darkness, amid hopelessness. She is so good at chronicling the microdramas that animate our days ... Ms. Offill is also funny, in that deadpan way of hers ... Ms. Offill is, once again, insightful about the gifts of a lasting, loving partnership ... Ms. Offill evokes the tender beauty that can persist in a terribly anxious time.
Offill has achieved the near impossible. She has made grappling with the climate crisis not only important and challenging — but also, a tough assignment, entertaining ... short on plot, long on research culled across millennia ... Bonus angst: The story is set in 2016, an election year of singular upheaval in itself.
Weather has a comparable thickness of atmosphere [to Dept. of Speculation], though the anguish that suffuses the new book is as much public or political as it is private or personal ... The American writer Donald Barthelme observed that Adler’s book [Speedboat] offered 'glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life.' One might say the same about Weather ... Weather is, as Offill once put it, 'funny as well as sad' ... Offill also rewards her narrator with a nice line in homes in homespun wisdom about relationships.
Neatly contained, truncated by decisive white space, Jenny Offill’s paragraphs...are pithy, aphoristic; mostly they stretch to the extent of a vivid vignette, and the logic that links them is not necessarily linear, but spatial, as they slip from observation to joke to anecdote to rehearsals of Q&As and facts carefully collected like objet trouvés, although the gaps between them never feel abrupt ... The book is that enviable achievement of managing to be both very funny and very serious. Offill cannily captures the anxious yet ambivalent ambience of late capitalism ... Writing from within her experience of how we react in this context of dread, panic and incredulity, Offill carefully mines the ironies of our bewilderment, and the deadpan comedy that follows is empathetic rather than dismissive ... At one level, this novel is also a freshly intimate family portrait ... Yet the book is also much bigger than that ... in a slim novel, the vertiginous but also everyday process of coming to terms with the approaching climate crisis is made vivid.
... for a novel of such heady themes — existential malaise and climate guilt, anxiety, and panic — the end result is a treat ... composed of small lyrical truffles, some of which work as standalone pieces, but all of which provoke a sense of deep emotion, of fleeting humor but lasting melancholy ... It is easy to feel like Weather doesn’t hit as hard as Dept. of Speculation, which catapulted Offill into the literary limelight. But that has less to do with any type of slippage in Weather and more to do with the influx of new books that read a lot like Dept. of Speculation — novels composed of short paragraphs that similarly rely on literary quotes, and also theory, seem ubiquitous nowadays ... But there continues to be something special and fresh in reading Offill. Weather feels narratively exciting, despite relying on now-ordinary tools. Part of this can be attributed to how Offill pushes the formal conventions she created in Dept. of Speculation even further. Instead of simply utilizing literary references and aphorisms, Weather relies on more: it is a kaleidoscopic mix of how-to disaster prep guide, reference book, and also — somehow — joke book ... insightful, a lullaby that soothes the panic that it also invariably stirs.
... captures something essential about a contemporary mood, a kind of pre-traumatic stress caused by the threat of what we know and don’t do anything about ... It is worth noting that this is Offill’s first novel that does not use outer space as a motif. What good is outer space to us now? ... occasionally overrelies on zingers, and there’s a silly running gag about an unreliable car service run by someone named Mr. Jimmy. But Lizzie’s ongoing drama with other parents and the neighbors, especially the unpleasant Mrs. Kovinski, is apt. We think of climate dystopia as being the province of science fiction, but it can and should be rendered in a recognizable milieu. Living through ecological meltdown will also be just living—hating the neighbors, having awkward interactions with the other parents at school ... There is something unsatisfying about Weather. It looks at the scariest things, but as if with one eye only. Offill’s mordancy is a kind of shield, as is the truncated form of the narrative fragments, which sometimes tie up feelings rather than allowing them to accumulate or overwhelm. It’s like the book itself can only barely bear its subject. Yet why should we ask one book to do what none of us can? It’s a novel for today, as novels today must be.
Weather is written not so much in consecutive paragraphs of narration but in often square blocks of text, each set off by white space, as if they were stanzas. They’re the work of a curator who likes a spare hang. Each paragraph is a little lonely, like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting. These parcels of feeling and intellect drop out one at a time, like packs from a cigarette machine. All the others descend down a slot, awaiting their turn. The effect of this style is to put a pause after every paragraph, to hold it up for a little extra light and a little extra examination, to allow it to linger in the mind. There’s a bit of the brilliant Lydia Davis in Offill ... Offill’s writing is often brisk and comic, and her book’s format underlines her gifts ... There’s a drawback to this format, too. Not every paragraph in a standard novel needs to shine ... when each paragraph in a short novel is cocooned in consecrating white space, as they are in Weather, the weaker ones can read like off notes rather than merely the veins or arteries that carry a story along ... Offill has genuine gifts as a comic novelist. Weather is her most soulful book, as well.
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’ ... At another level, Weather is a subtle portrait of a crumbling anthropocentric world of which the domestic life of Lizzie is a part ... 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 ... 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.
... enjoyable—charmingly wry after the fashion of Lorrie Moore ... What Offill excels at committing to the page is the flux and ephemera of everyday consciousness ... It’s as comfortable as an old slipper, which is one of the reasons why Offill’s fiction is such a pleasure to read and yet also disconcertingly easy to forget. Like water at the exact temperature of the human body, it can be hard to tell when you’re in it and when you’re not, where your transitory idle thoughts begin and Offill’s end ... Instead of a call to arms, Weather is a document of a certain way of life that we take for granted now, so much so that we barely pay attention to the texture of our own days. One day, all this will be gone, but here are some fragments to shore up against that ruin. Maybe then, they will be precious to us.
Jenny Offill may very well have chosen the perfect title for her novel Weather. For her book, which lacks much of a traditional plot, is about climate change, the mood or atmosphere of the world at large, and the narrator’s smaller world, namely her family and friends. The weather of the novel covers both the profound and mundane. But the pervasive mood is that of anxiety, sprinkled with some drops of humor ... The stream of consciousness narrative is deliberately and cleverly constructed ... Although to some degree, Weather preys on many of our present-day anxieties and concerns, it is not utterly without hope or humor. In fact, Offill’s dry wit diffuses some of the tension in her novel and makes its painful subject matter bearable. Weather is a well-crafted, profound, unsettling, and deeply resonant work.
... a must-read addition to the growing ranks of climate fiction, a genre that accepts climate catastrophe as the unavoidable context within which all modern stories unfold ... idiosyncratic and relentless, refuses to offer pat answers or to cash in on polarizing stereotypes ... Lizzie’s complexity reminds us: all you have to be to care about the world around you is human ... This type of birds-eye-view sweeps through the novel, jarringly woven into everyday anecdotes to stop you in your tracks again and again as the interconnectedness of our world is laid bare in your hands ... probes both our global environmental catastrophe and the uniquely American system that it is wrapped up in ... chilling, comforting, and funny ... Weather’s finely-wrought paragraphs are a collection of portraits, of individual truths and national anguish, curated by a quietly unravelling woman.
... an eerily realistic reflection on what it feels like to exist in a bubble of nonstop information ... [Offill's] power comes from her tight, spare prose. This proves particularly poignant whenever Lizzie interacts with her son, who makes delightful observations about a world he’s coming to understand ... evolves from a darkly funny commentary on surviving the 21st century to a timeless examination of the challenges that come with loving and living with the people we hold closest.
[Offill's] black humor and occasionally deep insights will keep your eyeballs glued to the page in search of a cure ... overhyped but still very much worth a read ... Fans of NYC dinner-party zingers and stumbled-upon profundities will appreciate Offill's contributions to the field ... The more profound moments arrive in Lizzie's fervent search for new perspectives to combat her growing dread, though these new perspectives aren't always comforting ... Though some of Offill's jokes and profundities can feel a bit pat, the overall structure of the book is greater than the sum of its parts, offering readers the pleasure of looking back through a diary and realizing that all our apparently disparate anxieties may fall under the umbrella of the larger one: fear of extinction ... Though fiction can allow us to diagnose this problem in all its messy human nuance, Offill knows it can never give us the cure.
Like Jenny Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation...Weather takes the form of short paragraphs, each beautifully shaped and self-contained, but the mood in these pages is more relaxed than in the previous book, despite the oppressive zeitgeist that overshadows them ... The story unfolds in the present tense, conversational, engaging ... Courageous, quirky and charming, Offill’s Lizzie is a woman you want to spend time with.
Weather is definitely not what I’d call entertaining; it’s a beach read for those who like to worry about the beaches. But the book also poses a set of important questions to us. If pop culture asks us to find the fun in human extinction, then Weather does the opposite, insisting that we take seriously the frazzled, burned-out experience of living when you know we’re all in for a very bad time ... Weather’s plot is scant ... The usual dramatic beats you’d find in a domestic novel—fights, cheating, divorce—get skipped. The book’s foreboding tone leads us to expect something bad will happen, but not much happens at all ... In part, that’s because the worst has already happened—in real life, to all of us ... Offill skirts many of the difficulties of portraying climate change by not portraying it at all. This is a pre-apocalyptic novel, and its subject is dread, not disaster ... Where action’s concerned, we mostly watch Lizzie go to work, pick up the mail, and clean mouse crap off her spice rack ... Is Weather just an exercise in highbrow bourgeois hand-wringing? Is reading—and for that matter, writing—empathetic stories while the world warms any better than watching zombie movies or posting Tide Pod memes? ... A more productive way to read Weather might be to understand its dread as willfully exhausting and useless. By the end of the book, it’s impossible to think that worrying alone is going to solve anything. At the very least, dread implies a desire to live, and many of us who have done enough worrying are ready to hit the streets.
What does it mean to be a 'good person, a moral person' during times of crisis? Should we judge ourselves differently? How do we adjust? The book’s humour often arises from the puncturing of these concerns ... Offill’s style recalls stand-up comedy, particularly the vulnerable, baffled schtick of the US comedians Maria Bamford and Louis CK. There are emotional switchbacks and non sequiturs as well as straight-forward gags ... She captures that awed sense that the world is infinitely complicated. Her koan-like musings reach far beyond themselves to express the feeling of being alive – the panic and disappointment as well as the moments of transcendence. On a more earthly level, Offill’s approach to writing recalls motherhood ... Offill returns us to the world anew.
...represents an artistic staying of the course ... Again we have as our narrator a searching, fretful, self-divided woman in early middle age ... again Offill builds her story out of a series of clipped and cutting fragments, though this time, alas, her method lacks the element of surprise ... What’s new is an expanded sense of scale, an attempt by Offill to place her characters within a larger, more vividly congested social world ... If the choppy style of Offill’s last novel managed to distill something of a parent’s frazzled consciousness, in Weather the same style is called upon to register the atmospheric disturbances of our ADD culture at large. It is an audacious and, as it turns out, slightly misbegotten project, like painting a house with a toothbrush, but the problem isn’t simply one of scale. Offill can be witty and effortlessly profound; she can also be schmaltzy and banal. Unfortunately her chosen form leaves little room for error ... In Weather, the quality of attention has slackened ... Offill can’t be faulted for endowing her protagonist with humanly recognizable emotions. What’s disappointing is her failure to go beyond the well-worn repertoire of affective responses to the environmental crisis, not simply to worry but to use her novel to actually think about it.
Like Dept. of Speculation, Ms. Offill’s latest novel, Weather is told in razor-sharp associative vignettes. It is just as difficult to put down as its predecessor, despite its heavier thematic content ... Ms. Offill distills modern horrors big and small into short, punchy bursts, including observations on the refugee crisis, heightened white supremacy, gentrification, and advice for living on a planet that is growing less inhabitable every day. She tackles all of this, as well as adjuncts selling their plasma and nervous white women swarming clinics for IUDs and much more, without weighing down the plot arc — an incredible feat in novelizing the political ... On the whole, Weatheris a crucial read because it’s reflective of our particular moment. I devoured it in two sittings. Like much of what we see on the news every day, it’s tempting to look away and shield ourselves, but this book implores us to do our best to pay attention and hold onto joy where we can find it.
In its first half, the novel feels meandering. Scenes are short and unconventional. It takes sharp attention to infer where Lizzie is, to whom she is speaking and how the scene connects to one earlier in the book. Often the narrator’s thoughts don’t seem to connect. But this style rewards patience: If you’re content to ponder Lizzie’s philosophical queries and make the most of her observations, you’ll be rewarded with a joyful sense of slowing down. Weather asks us observe our own thought processes in our daily lives.
Jenny Offill’s novel Weather is an attempt to grapple with a future that is hard to inhabit imaginatively, the consequences of climate change as they come ever closer, but it too suffers from an abrupt turn in the world outside the book, the advent of an upstart apocalypse. The pandemic at least has edges: there is the possibility of containment. The challenge Offill confronts, or tries to slip past, is to conceptualise a crisis without edges, or as her narrator Lizzie puts it, ‘21st-century everything’. Everything on the point of collapse ... It’s part of the working of the book that information which would normally be considered ‘establishing’ – necessary for a preliminary grasp of the characters and their relationships – arrives too late to perform that function.
Jenny Offill’s voice in Weather stays in your bones and invades your thought patterns long after the book is set aside. She writes in short dispatches, describing everyday occurrences and numinous moments alike in only a few lines. The effect is not fragmentation, however, but cumulative awareness and understanding ... Lizzie’s flaws and her empathy draw us close to her, and in many ways this is a book about how the mind of a sensitive, astute underachiever sustains itself in a time of political and environmental crisis. Despite its brevity—the novel is barely 200 pages—Weather is a work you want to linger over and live with for a long time. It is also the kind of work that, like most truly great novels, will resonate differently with different readers.
... smart, provocative ... short, absorbing and disturbingly funny. Its structure—quotations, lists, jokes, articles and emails mixed with Lizzie’s trenchant observations—echoes our current fragmented world and ever-shortening attention spans ... The title itself connoting climate conditions and the human ability to withstand and survive change, Weather feels both immediate and intimate, as Lizzie’s concerns become eerily close to our own.
It’s no simple matter to write about life at the end of the world but that is what American writer Jenny Offill attempts in her latest novel, Weather, a document of life on the climate frontier ... At just on 200 pages, Offill has carved her novel more with scalpel than pen ... There are silences. Offill doesn’t lay out easy paths to follow. In the absence of any real narrative arc, the reader must draw understanding from inferences, make connections out of fragments ... Weather is told in the present tense, from Lizzie’s first-person point of view. While there are snippets of dialogue, we mostly hear Lizzie’s interior voice, a loop that feels like a continuous present – akin to an endless scrolling through a social-media feed of acute aphorisms ... To say that Weather is zeitgeisty would be a grotesque understatement. Reading it in a year that opened with devastating bushfires, then blossomed into a global COVID-19 pandemic is queerly uncanny.
Jenny Offill’s writing evokes the image of a lone figure on an isolated beach, combing the sand in the hunt for something --- anything --- worth picking up. But unlike that solitary character’s typical yield of broken shells and worthless sea glass, it’s easy to picture Offill’s search yielding items of true value. It’s from the thoughtful accumulation of those precious fragments of keen observation that her apocalypse-tinged third novel, Weather, is painstakingly assembled ... Rolling from one fragment to the next, Weather is a pastiche of seemingly random observations, obscure factoids, bad jokes (featuring a turtle who gets mugged and a woman who thinks she’s a moth), and frequent glimpses of insight that flash like heat lightning. Out of the improbable ingredients that compose this bubbling stew, Offill simultaneously and unobtrusively creates both a world that’s a meaningful simulacrum of our own and something that looks like a conventional plot.
As many authors try to capture the period we live in, the anxieties we face within ourselves and as a larger whole—by, say, referencing such hot-button issues as climate change and economic disparity—Offill places herself within the conversation without being overbearing, without shouting too loudly ... [Ofill] knows subtlety, and knows how to create a tone that will make us laugh, pull at our heart strings, and, above all, genuinely surprise us. But most importantly, she knows how create a form which elucidates the way we perceive the everyday. It’s a perfect time in American life to have a writer like Offill, whose idea of a novel seems the most conducive to replicating our daily lives from the minor burdens, which can feel like Shakespearean tragedies, to our widely shared conflicts, those which are ignored and then ignored until they boil over.
... important [...] to observe about her craft and acumen, that here have climbed to a new level you might think of as a breakthrough ... this latest outing employs the material toward a larger and more compelling purpose: to illustrate the uncertainty of the present time, and to ask whether or not this is life being lived at the end of everything. Or, if not the actual end, something approaching it? ... there’s a funny, parabolic quality to the emotional weather in Weather — amidst all the unsettling harbingers, the sensation of being in end times, there is still love ... Call this book a tour de force, with true justification — but its message is just as much about the everyday essence of life as any coming storm.
Jenny Offill has long been interested in the distinctions people make between what is big and important and what is trivial. In 2020, nothing captures this false dichotomy—of being of both monumental importance and the subject of the most inconsequential small talk—as the weather. In her tidy third novel, Offill puts these two sides of the conversation on the same plane, cleverly capturing the ways in which climate change and concurrent political strife take up space in our minds right alongside each day’s forecast ... quietly stunning.
In Weather Offill [...] demands every word show its importance. Through stark vignettes we return to the domestic scene: a mother and wife has relinquished creative ambitions for structure. There are still myriad distractions, however, and it is here that the reader joins Offill in questioning what we can do in spite of the climate, politics, and all forms of sin. Beautifully composed fiction that is contemporary in both its execution and subject matter, Weather is astute, poignant, stunning.
Jenny Offill is a master of the right kind of detail ... It’s an appropriate method for a novel made up of aphoristic paragraphs; the small-plates approach to literature ... The gap after each paragraph, like a comedian’s forced pause, gives you time to process it before the next one comes along, and adds depth and texture to Offill’s jokes, hairpin turns and stabs in the heart. Often a section will start without context, which keeps the reader involved too; this is fiction that is easy to read, but demands vigilance ... There’s something faintly miraculous about how Offill gets us from there to here; baby steps from instagrammable anecdotes to a weightiness you can feel in your stomach. It’s all about those just-so details, which keep the reader sitting upright and give the good-value impression — up, down, funny, shocking — of two books for the price of one.
Like Offill’s previous novel, the acclaimed Dept. of Speculation, Weather unfolds in fragments, almost always in short paragraphs, with frequent digressions into history, jokes, dreams or Q&As ... Weather evokes, through an engaging narrator, the terrible, thrumming energy of this world on the edge and tells a human story to go along with it. It is beguiling and funny, melancholy and endlessly thought-provoking.
It’s difficult to read Jenny Offill’s very good new novel, Weather, without harkening back to her previous effort, Dept. of Speculation, which was outright spectacular ... oth novels are short and composed mostly of brief paragraphs packed with insight, wry humor and despair. And neither book is especially concerned with plot. One thing happens, and then another; cause and effect are intentionally blurred. However, since the novels mostly operate in discrete sections of one to six sentences, plot is far less important than the impact of the narrator’s latest moment of observation or intuition
‘Half written or recovered in pieces’ could describe Offill’s own style: short, luminous paragraphs, with a story dispensed through implication and allusion rather than conventional exposition. It is the sort of writing which suggests the brief intervals of liberty that punctuate days of maternal drudge, the shafts of light between clouds of obligation. Offill has invented a literature of the scraps, and as a creature of the scraps myself, I am grateful ... The resonance between the world she describes and the one I live in is so emphatic that reading her can feel like having my own interior narrative externalised – a disarming sensation that is a mark of her craft.
... another crisply revelatory portrait of a marriage and family in flux ... Offill, who will delight fans of Lydia Davis and Joy Williams, performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from 'tipping into the abyss.'
... excellently sardonic ... [Lizzie's] scattered, frenzied voice is studded with arresting flourishes ... Lizzie’s apocalyptic worries are bittersweet, but also always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel.
In its clever and seductive replication of the inner monologue of a woman living in this particular moment in history, Offill’s third novel might be thought of as a more laconic cousin of Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport ... The tension between mundane daily concerns and looming apocalypse, the 'weather' of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor ... Offill is good company for the end of the world.
