Bad Times
Jenny Offill’s new novel of dread.
By Tony Tulathimutte
These days, everything wants to kill us...
Every recent threat to human safety or human rights seems to have an analogue in pop culture: The Hunger Games for wealth inequality, The Handmaid’s Tale for the patriarchy, Watchmen for white supremacist terrorism... and... Jenny Offill’s latest novel, Weather.
Its characters... do almost nothing but care. Mainly they worry about climate change... Yet all this climate anxiety seems to do is ruin their sleep. “Everyone I know is trying to sleep less,” the narrator, Lizzie, muses. “Insomnia as a badge of honor. Proof that you are paying attention.”
In this way, Weather is definitely not what I’d call entertaining; it’s a beach read for those who like to worry about the beaches.
Set immediately before and after the 2016 election, Weather’s plot is scant. Lizzie... answers depressing e-mails part-time for a doomsaying climate podcast...
In part, that’s because the worst has already happened—in real life, to all of us. We’ve already blown past 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 and locked in at least 1 degree Celsius of warming from preindustrial levels, with many places seeing a rise of 1.5°C. At a 2°C rise, NASA tells us, drinking water will become scarce, and droughts will increase, which will probably lead to famines, and every year will bring more... As climate refugees flee the Global South, fascist leaders will scapegoat them and turn the richer nations into fortified garrisons...
The current attempts at cli-fi tackle this conundrum in different ways... It’s not that these novels fail on their own terms but that the demands of storytelling often run at odds with making climate change feel urgent; it’s either not real enough or all too real.
Offill skirts many of the difficulties of portraying climate change by not portraying it at all...
In little inset boxes, we see the e-mails Lizzie answers on behalf of her podcaster boss...
Given the ecological interest, maybe it’s fitting that so many aspects of the book are recycled, specifically from Offill’s previous novel...
Jenny Offill’s new novel of dread.
By Tony Tulathimutte
Every recent threat to human safety or human rights seems to have an analogue in pop culture: The Hunger Games for wealth inequality, The Handmaid’s Tale for the patriarchy, Watchmen for white supremacist terrorism... and... Jenny Offill’s latest novel, Weather.
Its characters... do almost nothing but care. Mainly they worry about climate change... Yet all this climate anxiety seems to do is ruin their sleep. “Everyone I know is trying to sleep less,” the narrator, Lizzie, muses. “Insomnia as a badge of honor. Proof that you are paying attention.”
In this way, Weather is definitely not what I’d call entertaining; it’s a beach read for those who like to worry about the beaches.
Set immediately before and after the 2016 election, Weather’s plot is scant. Lizzie... answers depressing e-mails part-time for a doomsaying climate podcast...
In part, that’s because the worst has already happened—in real life, to all of us. We’ve already blown past 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 and locked in at least 1 degree Celsius of warming from preindustrial levels, with many places seeing a rise of 1.5°C. At a 2°C rise, NASA tells us, drinking water will become scarce, and droughts will increase, which will probably lead to famines, and every year will bring more... As climate refugees flee the Global South, fascist leaders will scapegoat them and turn the richer nations into fortified garrisons...
The current attempts at cli-fi tackle this conundrum in different ways... It’s not that these novels fail on their own terms but that the demands of storytelling often run at odds with making climate change feel urgent; it’s either not real enough or all too real.
Offill skirts many of the difficulties of portraying climate change by not portraying it at all...
In little inset boxes, we see the e-mails Lizzie answers on behalf of her podcaster boss...
Q: How do you maintain your optimism?
A: If you are not getting enough iron, put a few iron nails into a bowl of lemon juice and leave it overnight. In the morning, make lemonade out of it.
Given the ecological interest, maybe it’s fitting that so many aspects of the book are recycled, specifically from Offill’s previous novel...
