If I was hoping that reading through the Women’s Prize shortlist might offer some timely distraction from the currently parlous state of the world beyond it, Jenny Offill’s Weather was here to ensure I had nowhere to hide. Narrated by a librarian convinced – like a monk awaiting the Viking horde – that the collapse of civilisation is fast approaching, I cannot imagine it will prove a comfortable read for anyone, much less someone – like me – who can’t quite shake the feeling that she might be right.
Weather reminded me of no book quite so much as Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, a volume of essays rather than fiction which adopts a fatalism about the planet’s predicament that proves hard to shake having completed it. “[S]uicide is protest,” Kingsnorth writes, “suicide is wilful disobedience” [p. 15], and one leaves the book with the sense he wishes that society could just put itself to sleep. Offill’s narrator, Lizzie, has achieved Kingsnorth’s certainty but not his equanimity: she is instead fixated on what she might do, not so much to prevent the collapse as mitigate it. “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.”
This sense of overwhelm pervades the text, and is a large part of why it proves so difficult to experience. It is an effect that Lucy Ellman evoked in Ducks, Newburyport, but differently: in that novel, the anxious narrator’s flood of thoughts drowns the reader in concerns big and small, relevant and trivial, founded and unfounded:
stranger danger, buckram buildings, the fact that I just don’t get why anyone would do that, Pottersville, the fact that people in the food business could poison people too, every day, if they wanted to, but they hardly ever do, Grant township, the fact that some people in Illinois declared rivers and streams have a right to exist, a right to flourish, but that’s in Illinois […] the fact that officially Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio make up the Midwest, just those four states […]
And so on. In Ellman’s novel – which due to its stylistic choices is eight times the length of Offill’s – a culture in crisis is depicted through the consciousness of a single individual, and the manner in which it cannot contain all that it is being asked to hold in place. In Weather, on the other hand, Offill’s protagonist is far more successful in shaping her anxiety into a single frame, a complete – if uncomforting – understanding. I think this, more than anything else, is why the novel reminds me more of Kingsnorth’s essays than Ellman’s novel: because it curates itself. This isn’t entirely to the subject matter’s benefit.
“Have you read all of these?” Lizzie’s neigbour asks her upon seeing her apartment’s collection of books. She has, but it hasn’t really helped – yet the craft of the prose that presents Lizzie’s crisis can sometimes contrive in its smartness to make everything a little too pat. There is a sense that Offill knows this, and in Sylvia – a travelling lecturer whom Lizzie once studied with and whose PA she becomes in the course of the novel – Weather casts a quizzical eye at the profiteering certainty of environmentalist prophets. “If you think you are lost,” we read at one point, “beware bending the map.” Sylvia has no answers, particularly – “Nothing lasts forever is the conclusion reached” – and her lectures increasingly feel like another symptom of the crisis, rather than a cogent analysis of it. “I’m starting to understand why all those people want to go to Mars,” Lizzie remarks.
Despite this, Weather – in all its well edited concision – can seem a tad insistent, exclusive and even closed; it is sometimes rather more certain than its narrator is meant in fact to be (“I wake to the sound of gunshots. Walnuts on the roof, Ben says”). Its signal is perhaps not sufficiently open to noise: “the impacts are going to be big,” Lizzie worries about the collapse – but the impacts are also going to be unpredictable. For Lizzie, however, they are always imagined as some sort of doomsday action flick: “one day I have to run to catch he bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.” I was a fan of Offill’s previous novel, Dept. of Speculation precisely because it constantly risked seeming preachy – but in its structural play always managed to achieve polyvalence. I’m not sure Weather quite manages the same trick.
In fairness, this is a novel about a woman’s inability to identify which events are catastrophic and which are not. “There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if it is truly a disaster,” she muses at one point. “Disaster psychologists use the term ‘milling’ to describe most people’s default actions when they find themselves in a frightening situation.” Weather is a novel of milling: Lizzie worries about leaving her job, about having an affair, about leaving her husband Ben, about going on a day trip to Washington DC, about Sylvia; but nothing actually happens. She is milling – but perhaps so too is the culture that sits around her, that it is her professional calling to categorise and catalogue. In that sense, Weather is a novel of our time, murkily certain of the likelihood of collapse and also ill-equipped to imagine or encompass it. We are all of us milling.
@Number 71 