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Weather by Jenny Offill review – wit for the end times

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/weather-by-jenny-offill-review

The follow-up to Dept. of Speculation is a dazzling response to climate crisis and political anxiety

In 2014, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation was greeted as a new sort of writing. Like Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Karl Ove Knausgård’s Boyhood, published in English in the same year, this was autofiction: a novel that blurred the boundaries with memoir. Unlike Cusk’s inquiry into other people’s stories or Knausgård’s famously expansive recollections, though, Offill’s book was dramatically pared down to taut, tight paragraphs trapped in the present tense, each packed with quirky observation and fantastic one liners. It was sold as “not so much a novel as the X-ray of one”. Six years later, Knausgård and Cusk have finished their sequences of novels; autofiction is so well established that it is being attacked for its solipsism; and Offill has finally sculpted another book, this time in even shorter paragraphs. Weather is barely novella-length and opens: “In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. ‘Bucket of black paint’ it means.”

Which should be a hopelessly cryptic way to start a novel, but social media has educated us since 2014. We now know how to read a few sparse details in a 280-character paragraph and put them together: this reads rather like a tweet, something a clever, deadpan literary person might punt out of a morning to give us all a laugh and a shiver of fond recognition. Offill’s protagonist swiftly moves on to more witty noticing of her peers: “Last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you’re doing right now making money?” And a bit of self-deprecation: “I wish you were a real shrink, my husband said, then we’d be rich.”

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