Weather is a novel, it's fiction, and yet it all feels a bit like navel-gazing.

''Weather''  is a novel by Jenny Offill, it's fiction, and yet it all feels a bit navel-gazing.


Navel-gazing, the main character, Lizzie, a middle-aged librarian, becomes entangled in climate anxiety

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/02/07/navelstarend-verstrikt-in-klimaatangst-a3989593

Jenny Offill ''Weather''

In this novel librarian Lizzie gets involved in the podcast of a climate scientist. Gradually a feeling of apocalyptic unease creeps up on her and she begins to turn into a prepper.

Navelstarend raakt ze verstrikt in Climat-Angst

Jenny Offill

In deze roman raakt bibliothecaresse Lizzie betrokken bij de podcast van een klimaatwetenschapper. Geleidelijk bekruipt haar een gevoel van apocalyptisch onbehagen en begint ze te veranderen in een prepper.

Jenny Offill (1968) found her form with the novel with which she broke through in 2014; the strong Broken Promises was written in short paragraphs that told the story of a woman who becomes entangled in depression, smothered ambitions and family life. Many blank lines. Her new novel Weersverwachting (Weather) also consists of small blocks of text. This time the American Offill tells the story of a woman who becomes entangled in climate fear, smothered ambitions and family life.
Note: if a form works, a writer has a certain style and theme, it doesn't have to disturb. Unfortunately, if that style is rather distinctive, it can become a way. With Weather Forecast Offill is on the edge, I believe. It does work, those chunks of text, it's got something addictive, but it can also create a sense of false urgency.
If you put something in a separate paragraph it soon gets emphasis.
You're, with good will, 'poetic'. Because you write. In sentences.
So it matters a lot what you write about. In this case: a woman who smothered her academic ambitions to help a brother who's in trouble. This Lizzie, librarian at the university, gets involved in the podcast of her former promoter, a climate scientist. She answers letters and emails from listeners (the letters from environmentalists are more boring than those from the end time thinkers). A feeling of apocalyptic unease creeps up on her - she begins to turn into a prepper, someone who prepares for major disasters and loves bunkers - all this at the time of Trump's election. Lizzie almost cheats, Lizzie becomes one of those mothers she didn't want to be, Lizzie is aware of her (white) privileges but doesn't fail to emphasize all the time that she lives in a neighborhood called 'Little Pakistan'.

Fictional navel

Weather  is a novel, it's fiction, and yet it all feels
a bit like navel-gazing.

Staring into the navel of a fictional person is actually as exhausting as staring into that of an existing human being. Consider the attempts to give the banal literary form, and it can even get a little compulsive: 'We were in the supermarket. All around us things were trying to proclaim their true nature. But their brilliance became duller and duller under the hideous music'. Nobody really likes the supermarket, but do you have to drag 'the true nature' of things into it to make it meaningful? And can't you just say that you're taking sleeping pills instead of a cautious one: 'The good thing about sleeping pill addiction is that they don't call it addiction, they call it "habituation"?



So it's nice that Offill Lizzie also has a sober and sometimes even funny slant, which she expresses in tapping tragic jokes and naming dry facts. Studies have shown that 94 percent of university lecturers think they do above-average work,' she reports. Or the husband who interrupts his foreplay to ask: are you wearing my thermo underpants?

Refreshing or confronting?

Perhaps the down-to-earthness also lies in the fact that, for Lizzie, the great misery, the climate, Trump, just seems to be part of the daily routine. She now goesogles prep techniques instead of other things, and in Lizzie's world the elections are making sure that waiting rooms of walk-in clinics are full 'of nervous white women' who are quick to spiral before the president closes the clinics.

You could consider it refreshing, or with some good will and for certain people, 'confronting' to see this great misery presented as 'casually', but you could call it more than refreshingly painful. I'm not much of a team myself 'art has to be terribly committed', but if you do relate to things like this, don't put them half aside in the life of (again) a woman who involves everything in herself and says about herself that she has become such a 'virtuous man'. We already have enough of that (inside and outside the literary), and the quasi-urgent and addictive nature of those loose paragraphs cannot compete with that.