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What happens when we wake up to the climate crisis? The novelist reflects on escaping the apocalypse, division and hope in her latest novel, Weather
It’s early January and freezing cold in New York when I meet Jenny Offill to talk about her new novel, Weather – an innocuous title for something that feels less innocuous every day. A couple of weeks earlier, the temperature was warm and spring-like. These fluctuations in the weather, and the warming trends they reveal, are increasingly unsettling reminders of the climate crisis, and they form the backbone of Offill’s latest novel, the follow-up to 2014’s bestselling Dept. of Speculation.
Weather follows Lizzie, a university librarian, who responds to the emails sent in to “Hell or High Water”, a climate-focused podcast hosted by her former academic mentor. The job opens Lizzie’s eyes to the crisis and the myriad ways different people respond to it, from “dreary” environmentalists obsessed with composting toilets to “end-timers” eager to embrace the Rapture. Amid a growing sense of her own responsibility to the planet and fear for the future, Lizzie struggles to balance her responsibilities as a wife, mother, sister, daughter and friend. Continue reading...