Jenny Offill’s new novel “Weather” was haunting me before I read it. I saw the epigraph online, a 26-word excerpt from the minutes of a town meeting in Milford, Connecticut, in 1640:
“Voted, that the earth is the Lord’s
and the fullness thereof; voted,
that the earth is given to the Saints;
voted, that we are the Saints.”
That final line is repeated once in the ensuing story, to cap off a domestic Fourth of July: dad handing out red, white and blue popsicles; kids playing Monopoly on the floor; and the dog growling at fireworks. “Voted, that we are the Saints.”
God help us.
In other reading, I’m nearing the end (finally) of ‘Moby Dick.’ Herman Melville’s mid-19th century era afforded him the conviction, clarity and hope to compose all 585 pages and 135 chapters of that epic story. Today the best, if not lacking all conviction, can only express it clearly in much shorter bursts.
Maybe our truths today should be delivered in little packets of revelation, like the best tweets. There are six sections and 200 pages to “Weather,” and the novel is told in bursts of words not more than 12 brief lines per paragraph, the exception being when Lizzie, the librarian protagonist, is asked, “What are you afraid of?” and “What are your most useful skills?” Then she has plenty to say, scared as she is of “dentistry, humiliation and scarcity,” and as diligent an apocalypse prepper as she’s become, having learned how to make candles out of tuna fish cans, poultices from tobacco, and to carry chewing gum “at all times for post-collapse morale” and as a helpful fishing lure.
Lizzie, urban-dweller, works at an unnamed university. She’s a wife, mother, sister, daughter and, maybe, overuser of sleeping pills and alcohol. Her world is populated by a “doomed adjunct” whose part of the story ends with his unfinished sentences, as though he’s lost even the ability to speak; a shabby-suited patron who works for hospice and so has unusually useful things to say; a patron mom whose daughter died of a heroin overdose because she went to the grocery store “for one minute”; a competitive mom who greets her son at the bus stop with the French terms for his snacks; neighbor Mrs. Kovinski, the resident hater who complains about Chinese language newspapers on her doorstep and calls the New York Times “your poision paper”; and Sylvia, her former professor, whose podcast episodes might all be called “The Center Cannot Hold.”
Sylvia, not given a title or credentials but who might be a climatologist, is not the book’s savior, nor are the Silicon Valley money guys Sylvia would like to invest in her ambitious “rewilding” plan for half the Earth. Silicon Valley is indifferent to her idea but is really selling its own de-extinction schemes. The guys are super-excited about wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers in particular. (“Voted, that we are the Saints.”)
There’s also Mr. Jimmy the car service driver, being slowly driven out of business by an unnamed, more efficient car service, who Lizzie seeks out; although his trips take twice as long as they might, she can’t afford him and ought to take the bus. She explains, “But what if I am the only customer he has left?”
Her familial despairs include overuse of air conditioning she can’t wean herself off of; an addict brother she can’t save; a mother whose dentist takes patients on a lottery system; and the inhuman scale of her son’s school, which doth protest far too much with its ubiquitous “Safety First!” policies. (She berates herself for the one son, too, asking, “Why didn’t I have more kids so I could have more chances?”)
She and her husband, Ben, find hope in releasing a bee or a mouse, and humor in the result of Nov. 8, 2016, which is summed up with a joke: “A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but he couldn’t help them. ‘It all happened so fast,’ he said.” Enough said about that.
Lizzie is right to think of herself as a “semidecent” person. That word, along with many others in this sad, companionable, darkly hilarious book, had me considering how civic engagement used to be an essential form of human-to-human connection, and how today it’s manifested mostly as virtual political activism, with the angriest and most provocative also, presumably, the most engaged, and no one really clear on what a decent person should be doing.
When homes first were electrified, Lizzie tells us, letters to the editors warned that families would no longer cling to one another in front of the fire, and that “young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments … Hahaha! … (Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)”
Also, what happened to the flying dreams of our youth? They’ve been replaced, in Lizzie’s world, by nighttime visitations of supermarkets: “Bad music is playing. It’s pitilessly lit.” She looks for and can’t find the off switch for the pitiless lights. I, too, have versions of this “I’m-Trapped-Somewhere-And- Can’t-Improve-Things” dream, about once a week these days.
The collapse of the planet in “Weather,” is like Moby Dick in “Moby Dick,” the actual white whale who, in Chapter 113, still hasn’t made an appearance, though his presence has shaded every word. Here’s one of Lizzie’s planet-collapse foreshadowings: “There are fewer and fewer birds these days. This is the hole I tumbled down an hour ago.” I tumbled down the same hole myself a few months ago.
Like the beautiful phrasing in the epigraph of “Weather,” much of this book has stayed with me and will keep me company in a difficult year. I’d like to type less and laugh more. If you can’t beat despair, at least you can sit down, or share books, with others who can’t beat it, either.
In one plot development, Lizzie takes a gig answering the engaged email questions and comments of Sylvia’s podcast listeners, which get crazier with time.
“Get out even nobody is considering it yet,” writes one.
“When you look at 2060, southern Argentina might be a good place for your children since it’s close to the Antarctic peninsula, the place where the survivor colonies will be built.”
But then, there is an empty white space where we might catch our breath. Somewhere in that emptiness is where I imagined congregations of my fellow humans, taking all this in and letting all this out together. As Offill writes, “They say when you’re lonely you start to lose words.” I’m grateful she hasn’t lost them all.
