Weather by Jenny Offill

It was the same after 9/11, there was that hum in the air. Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing. In stores, in restaurants, on the subway. My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn't want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.

Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill's Weather is a washed-out academic working at a local library. Her former mentor, Sylvia, asks her to fill in answering questions she gets emailed in connection to her podcast, like "What are the best ways to protect children from the coming chaos?" At home, she has a husband and a son, as well as a brother, Henry, who seems to be on the road to a family life himself until he relapses and becomes, we sense not for the first time, the narrator's burden to bear. Lizzie's own marriage pulls under the strain of Henry's presence, and her husband takes a little break, during which time Lizzie considers sleeping with a handsome journalist she's been flirting with at the bar. He's a war correspondent, and the world they share is a little like war, turned topsy-turvy by a recent event that is, but is never quite outlined, the election of Donald Trump in 2016. An emailer asks the difference between a disaster and emergency--well, which is this? And how does it fit in with the larger dread Lizzie feels as she imagines her future "doomstead," where she plans to be safe--she hopes--with her husband and son?

The most notable thing about Weather is its clipped, various style: each section takes up about a half a page at most. I've seen this work in other books, like Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever, where it's used for great comic effect. Weather tries to be comic, too, though perhaps it is too anxious and depressed about the state of the world to really rise above a general wry cleverness. Moments in Lizzie's life are mixed in with questions from the emailers, yoga mantras, other bits and bobs. It's all woven together, and cleverly and effectively enough.

But I have to admit this didn't work for me, for reasons I'm not sure I can really articulate. It might be that the little bits all seemed a little bit too neat, too clever. It might be that the non-narrative pieces, pulled from history and culture in the fashion of a librarian pulling cards out of catalog, felt as if they were simulating meaning rather than creating it. Or perhaps it was just too obvious that there was a hand there, manipulating the pieces, putting them into places. I don't think the reason it didn't work for me is that its vision of Trump's election as a kind of ambient disaster already seems a little bit passe here at the beginning of Trump 2--but I have to admit, it didn't help. It seemed to me to capture a kind of woeful liberal handwringing and malaise that has aged very poorly. But even saying that, I feel like I might have been more kindly disposed to another version of the same thing, and maybe the reason it didn't work for me is that it just didn't work, no more no less.