Book review: Weather by Jenny Offill

Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a genre on the rise — rather like sea levels. Jenny Offill’s Weather is surely the strangest, most charming entry yet into this emerging canon: a curious, dreamy book that is both a portrait of a polarized world (featuring preppers, doom-mongers and Twitter cowboys) and a small, intimate portrait of Lizzie Benson, a librarian, a mother of one, a sister of an addict, and an “unofficial shrink” to all and sundry. 

The scene is set in New York — probably Brooklyn, based on the number of hipsters and neurotics who populate the pages — where Lizzie lives with her husband Ben and their son, Eli. At the library, she frets about the disconsolate and motley patrons who pass her desk. The rest of the time she worries about her son; her declining mother; and especially her brother Henry, a recovering addict who’s just got together with Type-A Catherine, whom he met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, which is as portentous as it sounds. 

Against this personal tableau, there is the Bigger Picture: between chapters two and three, Trump is elected, and threats — side notes about “a wall”, and the likelihood of New York experiencing “dramatic, life-altering temperatures by 2047” — acquire sharper focus. Lizzie describes “nervous white women” waiting in IUD clinics, her husband wonders whether to get a gun. Crucially, the talk of climate crisis and survival post-apocalypse steps up a gear. “It was the same after 9/11, there was that hum in the air,” Lizzie observes. “Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing.” 

And yet Offill gives this heaviness a light touch. This is largely down to its unconventional form: the book is written as a string of vignettes, rather than free-flowing narrative, more stanzas than paragraphs. Some propel the story forward, others are simply snapshots, or observations. 

She describes a snobby mother at the school gates. “Her name is Nicola and her son’s name, inexplicably, is Kasper” — that “inexplicably” works so hard. Not every paragraph packs a punch, but the form skewers some of the doom and gloom of the novel’s through line — and many snapshots make you smile. Call it cli-fi, or doom-com, Weather is delightful and unexpected.

Weather by Jenny Offill (Granta, £12.99)