iPhone Notes but you paid an independent bookstore $27

a review of Weather by Jenny Offill

This is a book I would lie about liking to get an interesting-seeming boy with an MFA and no Instagram to like me. Luckily for all parties involved, I don’t like interesting MFA boys; I like sushi-grade boneheads.

The story needs to be harvested from fragmented paragraphs and my big ol brain is too distracted currently, perhaps always, to be a hunter-gatherer of metaphors in my leisure time. Lizzie, our narrator, works in a library while her life and the planet-at-large unravels. She lives with a low hum of doom. Everyone around her is on the brink. Her brother is fighting substance abuse. Her son is growing up, in ways she can’t control, into a frazzled, broken world. Her husband is just vibing. For Lizzie, the doom balloons and starts to consume until there’s no more room (Dr. Seuss vibe on my vibe). Rationally, I am aware of the doom expanding exponentially in every nook and cranny of this English muffin we call earth. But if I think about it too much, it subsumes me to inaction (you, too?! NO WAY!). In these moments, I puff on the metaphorical inhaler of optimism and make it through the day. Lizzie does not have this prescription.

This book is written in fragments, dispersed with pithy New Yorker cartoon-esque jokes, and some spare, exquisite dialogue. It feels like you’re reading iPhone Notes but you paid an independent bookstore $27 to do so. I think everything is profound

when it’s clipped into short, cryptic sentences.

I wanted to be carried by the story but felt instead like I was given a map by a smarmy concierge only to find the map was blank because it’s contemporary art, actually?

It’s about the urgency of our climate catastrophe, obviously, and how we blew it thanks to big ag, plastic-wrapped plastic, Mitch McConnell, etc. It’s important and it’s true. When I first learned about climate change, or global warming as we so quaintly called it, I was 9 or 10 and sleepless over humankind’s fuckup and what it meant the future. From what I understand, now we’re in the “what future?!” stage, but I am still going to buy climate credits/not eat meat/use mason jars/vote because it’s no skin off my teeth and I’d rather act as if I gave a shit about the planet even though I’m not sure I do/any of us do because if we did we’d do more.

Weather has lots of good survivalist tips I will forget ASAP because I can only live coddled, like a fine city-dwelling egg. If you’re yearning for an anxious narrator, you can just go on twitter where everyone is an anxious narrator. Nonetheless, reading this is still more pleasurable than arguing with my parents about what is and isn’t recyclable when I know it’s all headed to landfill anyway!