Weather (Jenny Offill, 2020)
I can’t tell you anything specific about this book. Was a complete memory wipe each time I put it down. But that seems to be the point. Offill’s writing conveys the effect of living in a permanent anxiety induced fugue state. It feels more like a loosely remembered memoir or perhaps it is a journal where the entries are only meant to mark the passage of time.
The last time I picked up a book where current events bled so obviously onto the fiction was the 2021 novel Bewilderment by Richard Powers. I believe the news should not be called upon to confer depth upon thinly written characters. That ought to be the job of the writer.
However, Offill simply refers to the real world as a filmmaker might plant a peculiar prop or include radio show in the background score to relay a sense of time and place.
Even as the world on fire bogs her down the narrator Lizzie’s distracted, halting, almost schizoid voice emanates from those cracks in our conscience that deepen in middle age. The objective — smattering of factoids and clippings from the news — is woven into the personal — fear of being a bad mom, the prospect of an affair. The ground beneath her is slipping and there’s so little quiet to find the next step. It’s almost as if the mind trails the body and all she (we) can count on is our animal instinct to do the right thing, make the right choice.
That being said, there’s a certain flavour of doomerism only the privileged exhibit. While Offill’s writing captures this about her narrator, I’m not certain it addresses that fact. The self aware first perspective glosses over internal moral contradictions. There’s something too neat about the package and I think Offill misses a trick here in not making her narrator more complex, more unlikeable. I am reminded of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake and Tishani Doshi’s Small Days and Nights, both of which succeed in indicting as much as sympathising with their leads.
Every other week அ and I break down under the duress of the our jobs, the news, our bodies, only to begin brainstorming potential places where we might ‘finally’ settle and ‘build the life we really want’. At present we live in a place that is too fast, too expensive and surrounded by people who are either fuelling this pace or mere fuel for the place. We look out of our window and hear an echo of faraway explosions, or perhaps that’s the sound of approving cheers. We’ve been here 3 years (THREE YEARS!) but it’s like we’re living out of a go-bag.
We go through our list. This is not so much a list as it is a rolodex of the same damn options. Tabled beside each place are pros and cons tagged based on theme: personal, financial, environmental. The spreadsheet is entirely imaginary. It makes the exercise exciting each time we start. The math is the same, but we’re hoping the solution is different. Maybe we forgot to carry over a one. Last time we did this we signed off with an announcement: we need to find a place to live around a community, ‘our’ community.
Last week the fruit seller asked me, ‘so long you don’t come eh!’