The New York Review of Books - 24.04.2020

42 The New York Review

dancing. “The improvisational situa-
tion can produce a helluva lot of anx-
iety,” she said:

The anxiety also comes when I

don’t want to be there—here—

right now.... The funny thing is

that if I knew—right now—that

I don’t want to be here—right

now—then I could play with that

and possibly turn it into being

here right now. But unfortunately,

knowing that you don’t want to be

here right now usually comes too

late to do anyone any good, until

maybe next time.

But “next time” was already here.

She played the tape during an impro-

vised solo performance. There she

was, dancing, “here—right now,” and

there the voice was, elsewhere, reflect-

ing on what it was like to be onstage.

“Next time I am going to try some-

thing new,” the voice said as she con-

tinued dancing. “I am going to say ‘It

has never been this way before; ain’t it

grand.’” Q

Storm Warning

Giles Harvey

Weather
by Jenny Offill.
Knopf, 208 pp., $23.95

In August 1968 The New Yorker
published Donald Barthelme’s short
story “Eugénie Grandet,” a two-page
absurdist parody of Balzac’s 1833 novel
about a wealthy provincial miser’s only
child and her tragic efforts to defy him.
A bit like Borges in “Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote,” Barthelme
takes a hefty canonical text and runs
it through his particle accelerator of
an imagination. All that remains of
Balzac’s intricate psychological drama
is a series of faux-naïf fragments. One
of them is a quotation from The The-
saurus of Book Digests summarizing
the novel’s plot; another the single sen-
tence, “A great many people are inter-
ested in the question: Who will obtain
Eugénie Grandet’s hand?”; another
the word “butter” repeated 113 times.
By condensing Balzac’s opus to a few
paragraphs, Barthelme was having a
laugh not just at his predecessor’s gen-
teel circumlocution—his tendency to
describe buildings and manufacturing
procedures and family trees in lavish
detail—but also at the conventions of
novelistic mimesis itself. Dialogue,
character development, the illusion
of a frictionless causal continuity be-
tween one scene and the next: more
than a century after the zenith of real-
ism, Barthelme seemed to be asking,
Weren’t we all getting a little old for
this kind of thing?
Barthelme makes a brief appearance
in Jenny Offill’s widely beloved sec-
ond novel, Dept. of Speculation (2014),
when its narrator, a promising young
writer whose creative ambitions have
been interrupted by the exigencies
of motherhood, recalls the following
exchange:

A student asked Donald Bar-

thelme how he might become a

better writer. Barthelme advised

him to read through the whole

history of philosophy from the

pre- Socratics up through the

modern- day thinkers. The student

wondered how he could possibly

do this. “You’re probably wast-

ing time on things like eating and

sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease

that, and read all of philosophy

and all of literature.” Also art, he

amended. Also politics.

Like Barthelme, Offill is a writer who
has read widely and intelligently enough
to understand just how much the con-
temporary reader can do without (and
how little time he has to spare). At less
than 180 pages, Dept. of Speculation
is the result of an inspired demolition

job. After spending years on a longer,

more traditional novel that refused to

come together, Offill stopped trying to

force it; instead, she wrote out what she

considered the best bits on index cards,

then shuffled them around until she ar-

rived at something she was happy with.

The streamlined version, made up of

elliptical yet propulsive fragments,

many of them no more than a sentence

long, tells the story of a marital crisis

with the efficiency of a comic strip.

Suggestive snippets of dialogue and

description are juxtaposed with sur-

real factoids and literary quotes; Offill

trusts the reader will know how to put

these pieces together.

The index-card approach wasn’t sim-

ply a way out of a creative impasse,

however; it was also a response to the

particular demands of Offill’s material.

As a young woman, the book’s un-

named narrator had planned never to

get married. “I was going to be an art

monster instead,” she tells us. “Women

almost never become art monsters

because art monsters only concern

themselves with art, never mundane

things.” So it proves with the narra-

tor who, in mundane fashion, falls in

love, gets married, and has a child. It’s

here that her troubles begin. Not only

is motherhood antithetical to a life of

artistic production; its monotony and

relentlessness threaten to render it un-

narratable. Offill’s rapid-fire account of

the experience at once reflects the new

parent’s scatterbrained, emotionally

turbulent state of being and alleviates

the subject matter’s inherent tedium.

One moment, the narrator is reeling

from the thrill of saying the words “my

daughter” for the first time, her heart

“beating too fast, as if I might be ar-

rested.” The next, she is overcome

with rage when she hears a woman on

the subway using the hopelessly mis-

taken platitude “sleeping like a baby”:

“I wanted to lie down next to her and

scream for five hours in her ear.” Later,

when her husband, a competent, car-

ing man whom she’d trusted uncondi-

tionally, starts sleeping with a younger

colleague at his office (“You fucked

a child! She’s a fucking child!”), the

same fractured narrative style just as

fittingly captures the deranging psychic

intensity of betrayal.

Dept. of Speculation marked a radi-

cal departure from Offill’s first novel,

Last Things (1999), a more straight-

forwardly told tale of a disintegrating

marriage as seen through the eyes of

the couple’s young daughter. Her latest

book, Weather, by contrast, represents

an artistic staying of the course. Again

we have as our narrator a searching,

fretful, self-divided woman in early

middle age, though this time, instead of

a novelist, she is a librarian at the uni-

versity where she failed to complete her

Ph.D.; again the narrator is married to

an even-keeled, attentive man whose

role it is to calm and contain her anx-

iety, though this time it is the wife and

not the husband who is led into tempta-

tion; again the couple live in Brooklyn

with an only child, though this time it is

a boy; and 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. To be fair, Dept.

of Speculation doesn’t play out in a vac-

uum, even if the prevailing mood is one

of domestic claustrophobia. Members of

the downwardly mobile creative class,

the central couple have to pinch pennies

and work multiple jobs, and this contrib-

utes to their marital discontent. In the

end, their problems—or at least the eco-

nomic ones—are solved when the nar-

rator’s wealthy sister provides her with

a rambling country house, where she

and her family have the chance to start

afresh. It’s a somewhat glib conclusion

to an otherwise bracingly clear-eyed

novel, but it reflects Offill’s preoccupa-

tion with social realities and the limits

they impose on women who want to be-

come “art monsters.”

In Weather, domesticity remains

front and center, the source both of

life’s deepest satisfactions and its deep-

est pain, but the social realities that

bear down on it have metastasized. Not

only does Lizzie, the narrator, worry

that the spark has gone out of her mar-

riage to Ben, who holds an advanced

degree in classics but earns his living

designing educational video games;

the planet is also getting perilously hot.

By 2047, she reads online, “New York

will begin to experience dramatic, life-

altering temperatures,” but the psy-

Jenny Offill