Jenny Offill’s debut, Last Things, appeared two decades ago, but her breakout book was 2014’s Dept. of Speculation. It comprises dozens of short blocks of text, the longest a few pages, the shortest no longer than the message in a fortune cookie. This form is tailored to the book’s content, a brief history of a marriage from its beginning to its near-ending as a result of the husband’s infidelity. A novel of broken pieces, Dept. of Speculation says that all we retain of a relationship are our memories: the good ones, the bad ones, and a handful of cryptically significant in-betweens.
Offill’s new novel, Weather, returns to Dept. of Speculation’s fragmentary, epigrammatic form. But the resemblance doesn’t end there. Where Dept.’s unnamed narrator was a novelist and professor saddled with a side job ghostwriting a wealthy man’s history of the space program, Weather’s Lizzie is a university librarian with a gig answering listener emails for her mentor’s podcast about ecological catastrophe, Hell or High Water. The women at the center of both books live in Brooklyn with a winningly precocious child and a cipher of a spouse—called only “the husband” in Dept. of Speculation, he is promoted to Ben, a classicist-cum-video game designer, in Weather. Lizzie also looks after her brother Henry, a recovering addict.
Weather is, in a broad sense, a book about how to live (how to be a spouse, a parent, a sibling) and especially about how to live with fear. Lizzie navigates some relatably mundane fears: of leaving her son, Eli, in a huge, crowded school; of feeling inferior to wealthier, better-prepared parents; of neglecting her talents and ambitions; of aging, feeling that time itself is speeding up. But she also fears climate change, environmental collapse, social disorder, and Donald Trump. As a listener to Hell or High Water writes in, “What are the best ways to prepare my children for the coming chaos?”
Much of what made Dept. of Speculation a pleasure is on offer in Weather. Our gimlet-eyed narrator is complex enough to be frequently unlikable, prickly on the outside and arrogant on the inside. Minor characters (a gifted child, a nuisance neighbor, a blowhard who has a comment and a question at a conference Q&A session) exist solely to be the objects of Lizzie’s disbelief or dismay. But she is sharp enough to notice when others return the favor and to scrutinize her own flaws.
Lizzie is also undeniably funny. Hearing about the “Suits” and the “Creatives” at an ad agency, she imagines them as rival gangs, spoiling for a “rumble.” She has an eye for the perfect detail, recalling a Bible camp film in which a father is summoned to heaven in the rapture, leaving behind nothing but his electric razor buzzing on the floor. Her curiosity, her insight into others, and her complicated but sincere love for her family all give her heft as a character and earn her our sympathy.
As Lizzie sensitizes herself to danger, as her self-described “obsession” with disaster preparedness (or “prepping”) mounts, one gets the uneasy feeling that Weather is accidentally satirizing behaviors that Offill herself takes quite seriously. Most of Lizzie’s “preparations” are silly. How to make a candle out of oil-packed canned tuna? This makes for good trivia, but in the event of the apocalypse, it would be smarter to stockpile candles and save food for eating. Printing out lists of prepper acronyms? It serves no purpose, but Offill has a weakness for lists.
Trump’s election is alluded to but not mentioned explicitly, as if doing so might be bad luck. Suddenly Lizzie and Ben are whispering about whether or not to buy guns, worrying about whether their internet history will put them on a federal watchlist, or discussing the likelihood of neighbors turning against them. This kind of persecution cosplay, in which Hillary Clinton voters cast themselves as history’s least-imperiled resistance fighters, was tiresome four years ago, and it has not aged especially well.
In Dept. of Speculation, Offill’s narrator dreamed of being an “art monster,” an egomaniacal creative juggernaut who is oblivious to the feelings and needs of others. Weather’s Lizzie nurses a similar sense that she ought to be doing great things but is held back by marriage, parenthood, and the strain of keeping her neurotic brother afloat. Absent any evidence of her own greatness, she retreats to a fantasy of participation in world-historical events. Everyone knows someone like this.
If Lizzie’s paranoia feels like a shortcut to meaning, Offill’s approach to storytelling makes matters worse. The structure that seemed so singular in Dept., so perfect for illustrating the progression and dissolution of a relationship, becomes, in Weather, a tricky way of hinting at depths Lizzie does not possess. Offill’s trivia, jokes, lists, quotations, and questionnaires are like pieces of a collage. They seem deeply suggestive, but are they? At times, Weather feels not unlike a stylish, high-middlebrow bathroom reader.
In Dept. of Speculation, Offill used her digressions to razor-sharp purpose. A section about the golden records stored on the Voyager space probe did more than just furnish a parallel to Offill’s own curation; it set up an important revelation about the collapse of one of Carl Sagan’s three marriages, thus allowing Offill to meditate upon social presentation and how we rationalize painful decisions. By contrast, Weather is full of ornamental facts: It is illegal to name your child “Sex Fruit” in New Zealand; there is a Malagasy moth that drinks the tears of sleeping birds. These are cool, but only up to a point.
Dept. of Speculation was a moving story of love lost and tentatively regained. Its appeals to curiosity and wonder made a bitter pill easier to swallow. Weather does not convince the reader that we are, as one character suggests, “living in unprecedented times”—only that the safe and comfortable love to exaggerate their troubles. If impending doom is supposed to concentrate the mind, why do Offill’s characters face it so lazily, listening to podcasts, reading listicles, opening more browser tabs? Maybe the forecast doesn’t look quite so bad after all.