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chological alterations—the preemptive
nostalgia for the present, the exhaust-
ing fear of the world to come—have
already begun in earnest. When Don-
ald Trump is elected halfway through
the book, Lizzie’s free-floating anxiety
finds a concrete outlet in the sooth-
ing fanaticism of prepper culture. She
learns how to fish with chewing gum,
that red ants taste “lemony,” and why,
in a postapocalyptic situation, a thou-
sand BIC lighters (cheap, tradable)
might be a better source of power than
a generator (heavy, loud).
But even as the background has
grown in depth and detail, the canvas
remains the same size. Like its prede-
cessor, Weather is a brief novel that
quietly mounts a case for the virtues
of brevity. At one point, Lizzie men-
tions her obsession with “lost books,
all the ones half written or recovered
in pieces.” Offill’s own book comes to
us pre-shattered, as it were, its form
investing it with the aura of a docu-
ment from a lost civilization. This feels
appropriate, given her concern with
looming societal collapse, and at their
best the various narrative shards, laid
out like stanzas, capture with a poetic
intensity the self-parodic mania of con-
temporary life.
In one short sequence, a student tells
Lizzie she’s decided not to get the lat-
est smart phone. “I know I’m missing
things because I can’t respond quickly
enough to what people say or show me,
but that’s okay,” the student says. “It
gives me more time to think.” Lizzie,
a liberal humanist who worries tech-
nology is flattening our souls, finds this
endearing: “She seems practically like
a transcendentalist.” Then the student
takes out her phone:
It is exactly the same kind as mine.
Mine is two years old but still
retrieves things for me in the blink
of an eye.
“Wait,” I say. “Were you talking
about seconds? When you said
you were so out of step and living
slowly, did you mean by seconds?”
She considers this. Yeah, she says,
seconds probably.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 distur-
bances of our ADD culture at large.
It is an audacious and, as it turns out,
slightly misbegotten project, like paint-
ing a house with a toothbrush, but the
problem isn’t simply one of scale. Of-
fill can be witty and effortlessly pro-
found; she can also be schmaltzy and
banal. Unfortunately her chosen form
leaves little room for error: when so
much is left out, what remains is nat-
urally going to bear a greater burden
of scrutiny. In Dept. of Speculation,
the narrator tells us that a Zen master
who was asked to write a distillation of
the highest wisdom responded with a
single word—“Attention”—and Offill’s
second novel, a display case of things
acutely seen and heard, was a fine em-
bodiment of this ideal. In Weather, the
quality of attention has slackened.
One of the book’s plot threads in-
volves Lizzie’s becoming a part-time
assistant to her former mentor, Silvia,
a public intellectual who hosts a popu-
lar podcast on climate change. The job
involves attending fancy dinners with
people on the board of a foundation
that Silvia started. At one of these, Liz-
zie finds herself sitting next to a young
tech entrepreneur who talks her ear off
about the bright future that people like
himself are bringing into being. When
she tries to voice a skeptical opinion he
ignores her and beginsto list all the ways he and his kind
have changed the world and will
change the world.... Soon every-
thing in our lives will be hooked up
to the internet of things, blah blah
blah, and we will be connected
through social media to every
other person in the world.Anyone who has ever met someone in
tech or read about the industry will
know that this is broadly how such peo-
ple talk, but wouldn’t we be within our
rights as readers to expect something
a little more rigorous or surprising? In
effect, Offill is signaling that what the
man said was hardly worth paying at-
tention to, but in that case, why bother
telling us about it in the first place? The
fact that the passage is set off on its
own, floating poetically in white space,
only underscores its weightlessness.Too much of the writing in Weather is
like this. Lizzie has a brother, Henry,
a recovering drug addict who hastily
marries and has a child with a New
Age control freak named Catherine.
“The baby is here!” Lizzie tells us in
a wedge of prose that wouldn’t seem
out of place on a lifestyle blog. “She ar-
rived last night at 3:04 AM. Her name
is Iris and everybody thinks it’s a good
name.” Well, nice to know they’re all on
the same page! Elsewhere the narrative
can sound like the voiceover from a lost
Terrence Malick film: “It still comes
back to me sometimes, the way the light
came through those windows. The dust
had a presence. At least if you stared
at it long enough, it did.” The careless
repetition (“comes,” “came”) is hardly
damning in itself, but it’s indicative of a
more pervasive negligence.
The larger rhythms of the book
soon grow labored and monotonous.
Whenever we encounter an earnest or
unsettling idea, as when Lizzie takes
a meditation class in which the partic-
ipants repeat the mantra, “Breathing
in, I know I will have to let go of ev-
erything and everyone I love. Breath-
ing out, I know there is no way to bring
them along,” we can be fairly sure a
mood- lightening wisecrack is never
far away—in this case, “Aw, c’mon,
man. Everything and everyone I love?
Is there one for beginners maybe?”
Worse, the snatches of obscure, beguil-
ing knowledge that in Dept. of Spec-
ulation had the power to catch us off
guard and reconfigure the meaning of
the surrounding text have come to feel
routine, part of the grammar of a new
convention.
Where Weather really comes up
short is in its portrayal of human be-
ings and their “enmeshment” in a so-
cial web (to use a term favored by the
novel). “You seem to identify down,
not up,” Lizzie’s meditation instructor
observes in the opening pages, and the
book, to be sure, is teeming with belea-
guered minor characters, the casualties
of economic development. There is
Mr. Jimmy, the proprietor of an old-
fashioned car service being put out
of business by Uber and Lyft. There
is Mrs. Kovinski, the elderly, Trump-supporting super of Lizzie’s apartment
building. There is the owner of a hard-
ware store on Flatbush Avenue whose
complaints about the influx of new res-
idents (“They don’t care about service.
They don’t care about expertise. And
their understanding of inventory is un-
realistic”) clearly echo Lizzie’s anxiet-
ies about the younger generation and
the fate of her own increasingly precar-
ious trade.
Watching all these characters appear
(there are many more besides) is a bit
like attending a wedding reception in
a studio apartment: you wonder how
everyone is going to fit. The real prob-
lem turns out to be somewhat different.
Overrun by guests, Offill doesn’t have
time to attend to anyone sufficiently,
and so we are left with a din of indis-
tinct voices. Like the tech guy Lizzie
encounters at the foundation dinner,
the other minor characters are little
more than vague annoyances. Mrs.
Kovinski, the super, tells her how she
came to use a cane after slipping and
falling: “And tells me and tells me.”
Lizzie’s new sister-in-law, Catherine,
warns her against using antibacterial
soap “because lalalalalalalalala.” Even
the dashing war reporter whom Liz-
zie flirts with at a neighborhood bar
while Ben is on a road trip with their
son comes straight out of central cast-
ing. “One of the things I like about
Will is that he doesn’t seem to mind if
I blather on about zazen,” she tells us.
(But of course: it is only when other
people blather on that troubles arise.)
“I can tell he’s firmly in the school of
whatever gets you through the night.
I wonder sometimes what he’s doing
here. ‘Just passing through,’ he says.Right, right, ramble on, sing your song,
that kind of thing probably.”
The passage raises a useful question,
if only inadvertently: What is he doing
here? What are all of these hazy bit
parts doing in the book? The solidar-
ity that narrator and novelist alike pro-
fess to feel with other people, it slowly
dawns on you, is only paper-thin. Their
real function is to serve as fodder for
Lizzie’s projections and observational
comedy. The same could almost be said
of the climate emergency itself, which
looms over the book like a smoking
Vesuvius. Anyone who has considered
the nightmare of climate change for
any time at all will be familiar with the
exponential dread it inspires in Lizzie,
and Offill can’t be faulted for endowing
her protagonist with humanly recogniz-
able 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.
Realism may be a giant worth tilting
at, but as a book like Weather suggests,
narrative longueurs are hardly a peril
unique to the Balzacs of the world. Nor
is formal daring any guarantee against
commonplace perceptions. As it hap-
pens, writers working within the suppos-
edly staid lineage of nineteenth- century
amplitude (Ian McEwan in Solar, say,
or Richard Powers in The Overstory)
have tended to give a stranger, more in-
tellectually satisfying account of climate
change and the struggle to address it.
Theoretical allegiance will tell you only
so much; the real difference is between
the novelist who listens and the novelist
who merely waits to speak. QThe Robert B. Silvers Foundation herewith invites applications
for the 2020 Silvers Grants for Work in Progress. Authors with
contracts (or editorial agreements) for long-form articles or full-
length book projects in the fields of criticism, political analysis,
social reportage, or the intellectual essay that require up to
$10,000 in financial support for travel and/or research may apply.
Applications should take the form of a curriculum vitae, a one-
page description of the project, a statement of estimated costs,
and one sample of the writer’s work. Completed applications may
be submitted until April 20th, 2020, and should be emailed to
[email protected], or sent via post to:The Robert B. Silvers Foundation
PO Box 141
New York, NY 10014ʴʨʥʘʖʘʖ
ʳʩʬʶʥʲʳʧʲʡʮʴʳʦʯʲ
ʷʯʲʫʩʮʰʲʯʧʲʥʳʳ
The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is a charitable trust established
by a bequest of the late Robert B. Silvers, founding editor of
The New York Review of Books, with the aim of supporting
writers in the fields of long-form criticism, essay, and journalism.