“Young person worry: what if nothing I do matters? At the very least, to think the right thoughts. Offill, one would conclude, is urging us to do what we can. “I always thought it was ridiculous to try and fight for social change when I couldn’t even get my own house in order,” writes an unidentified Offill on the website’s introduction. There’s also a “Learn More and Get Involved” section. Ĭlick and you find “Tips for Trying Times” (there are 45, including quotes from James Baldwin and Ernest Shackleton) and “People of Conscience” that profiles individuals who are taking action. How does one correlate with the other?Īt the end of Weather is an otherwise blank page with a website with a somewhat cynical URL.

Lizzie is immersed in the day-to-day details of neighbors and schools and games and doctors and dentists and yet is also asked to contemplate End Times. Lizzie is slouching toward full neurosis, but she wishes there was a plan to keep doomsday at bay. That “library roulette” thing allows for the introduction of many juicy topics. Lizzie is droll, snarky, and keenly observant. Offill expects readers to stitch bits together in their heads. Looking for a big sweeping narrative with prose that makes you forget you’re reading? Look elsewhere. Weather reads, at times, like a novel deconstructed. The information comes at us in fragments. Lizzie and Ben consider various places to flee before doomsday arrives-and reading this book before the COVID-19/coronavirus crisis of March 2020 made it easy to think doomsday was nigh. The email queries come from both sides of the debate. Lizzie has a side gig answering emails from listeners of a podcast called “Hell and High Water” run by a former mentor. Their son Eli is a first-grader in Brooklyn. She is interested in “prepper things.” Her husband Ben is Classics PhD and makes educational video games. She doesn’t have a “proper degree.” (Pedigree and status are an underlying theme throughout this novel.) Lizzie is helping Henry, her drug-addicted brother. Weather, Offill’s new novel, has that random feeling. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. “Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can’t write, and I can’t write most of the time. In a 2014 interview with Paris Review, she said: In an interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Jenny Offill said her writing process and research includes something called “library roulette.” She described walking into a library (my words) and forcing herself to explore new territory.