I just finished reading the novel Weather, by Jenny Offil. It’s about climate anxiety so not exactly light reading if you’re looking for a distraction, but it is in short and in fragments so very readable if your attention span is shot to hell. It’s also completely brilliant. A few thoughts, equally fragmented:

– What’s brilliant about it, as highlighted in this interview with my friend Jo, is that it’s not, like a lot of climate fiction a futuristic dystopian scenario. It’s about now, about living with anticipatory grief and anxiety, about the gap between what we know and our day to day lives. We think – at least I sometimes think: – ok, when I get my life together, I’ll become a better, more full time activist and live a serious enough life, but most of the time we scroll the articles, give money, then read a kid a bedtime story and deal with annoying people at work. This is what Lizzie, the book’s librarian protagonist does. There’s a lot of gentle humor in her relationship to her husband who takes a numbers-based approach to things that are likely to resonate with couples and friends dealing with their different responses to Trump anxiety, climate anxiety, and, now, virus anxiety.

– Along with anticipatory anxiety, a major theme is the illusion of safety. Lizzie’s climate scientist mentor takes her to a dinner with silicon valley bigwigs (“They want to live for ever but they can’t wait two hours for a cup of coffee.”) After they politely listen to the numbers and the warnings and everything, they get to their real, had a few drinks question: Where should we go? Where will we be safe in 50 years? Of course we wouldn’t ask for ourselves, they say, but we’ve got kids. They know their money can’t buy what they thought it could, but at least it should buy them an answer to the question. I’m thinking a lot about the stories told by illusions of the safe place, if only we can get there. Zionism, of course. Reading this close to Passover: the story of forty years in the desert and then the safe place. But, more complicated for me personally, the way people in my grandmother’s generation would talk about those who were smart enough to leave Europe in time. I never thought America was a safe place, but I knew that intellectually. Now it just seems crazy we could have ever thought this was the safe place. That running from programs and seas and viruses is the norm of our lives and we had this funny little blip of suburban life and the biggest worry your family’s pressure on you to be a doctor, all of it.

– It’s really funny! Not just dark sardonic stuff, though there’s some of that too, but actual jokes.
Like: “Bartender says we don’t serve time travelers. A time traveller walks into a bar.” Are Jonathan Safran Foer or Frazen ever funny in their why-we-eat-animals-why-I-love-birds-and-we’re-all-doomed but-I-actually-don’t-write-as-if-I-feel-very-doomed-at-all-books. It seems pretty telling to contrast the title of this book – Weather, the atmosphere, the thing that shapes us – to Jonathan Safran Foer’s We are the Weather in terms of ego and proportion. As with COVID, one thing the climate crisis teaches us it that our lives are biological and constrained by cells and particles and how recent and strange a thing that we have constructed a world that allows us to forget this. Sometimes I think climate change is our punishment for always thinking that “talking about the weather” was what superficial characters in Victorian novels did to avoid the really important and taboo topics.

– The main character’s son’s name is Eli, and they have a bedtime ritual eerily similar to ours, and the characters live in the neighborhood next to ours, though it’s unnamed, as she also brilliantly doesn’t name Trump or Uber or many of the other way-we-live-now elements of the book. There’s even a discussion of the racial disparities of the G&T program in Brooklyn schools. Well, Brooklyn mothers are not exactly underrepresented in contemporary literature, so I shouldn’t feel particularly pandered to, but still. Since the whole novel is uncanny, this did not exactly take away from the feeling. I actually feel like if I were more talented and wanted to write a book about what is in my brain in 2020, it would be this book, which is kind of a nice feeling, since then I can not feel bad that I could never have written it.