obligatorynoteofhope.com

During​ the US presidential campaign of 2016 Louis Amis wrote a scabrous satirical story from the point of view of a member of Trump’s team, a daring exercise in fantasy that was revealed as hopelessly timid when the election result was announced. Jenny Offill’s novel Weather is an attempt to grapple with a future that is hard to inhabit imaginatively, the consequences of climate change as they come ever closer, but it too suffers from an abrupt turn in the world outside the book, the advent of an upstart apocalypse. The pandemic at least has edges: there is the possibility of containment. The challenge Offill confronts, or tries to slip past, is to conceptualise a crisis without edges, or as her narrator Lizzie puts it, ‘21st-century everything’. Everything on the point of collapse.

Weather is made up of self-contained paragraphs like the following, which is not just characteristic but paradigmatic of the book’s concerns: ‘Eli [Lizzie’s young son] is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben [her husband] brings him a bowl of water so he can dip them in to test. According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience dramatic, life-altering temperatures by 2047.’ How to bring these two overwhelming realities, harmonious family life and ecological meltdown, together? Historically, literature privileges the microcosm over the macrocosm, but there comes a time when this is not just an inadequate response but an indefensible one.

The paragraph-long sections of Weather are usually short (typically there are four or five paragraphs to a page) and separated by a space equivalent to two lines of type. Every page or so a more substantial suspension of movement – a ‘beat’, it might be called in the theatre – is marked by a row of three dots. A paragraph both preceded and followed by a set of such dots is a rare event and perhaps flags up a special status for the words encased. Paragraphs are unindented, as is traditional for the opening of a book or one of its major constituent sections; this seems to characterise each one as a fresh start and weakens the sense of progressing drama. In the time frame of the book, Lizzie interacts with friends, colleagues and family members. She also experiences an election and a chaste affair, but these too spring from, and feed back into, the discussion of narrowing options in a world where the rich invest in ‘doomsteads’ (which they imagine will keep them safe) and the non-rich consider what skills they have for survival. Lizzie, very much non-rich, owns up to a deficit of relevant skills. She is ‘all talk, no action’. One day she has to run to catch a bus and her lack of fitness makes her realise that all her preparations for apocalypse are futile: ‘I will die early and ignobly.’

Lizzie is introduced in the context of her work, ‘pulling books’. To those who chose this career path more deliberately she belongs to a class of ‘feral librarians’ lacking the proper academic background. It’s a delicious phrase, exemplary in showing that a professional insult can retain a faint flavour of the collegial. At work in the library, which is part of a university, she can pursue her own preoccupations, though a book returned by a borrower, such as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which she leafs through in her lunch break, may seed her thoughts with an apposite citation: ‘A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.”’ There seems to be no way of encompassing catastrophe, but there is no way of dodging it either. Action and inaction are equally unthinkable. Even small-scale communal action that might provide an interim sense of purpose goes nowhere. Lizzie serves on a ‘soul-crushing’ committee that is trying to get a hole in the boundary fence of her son’s school repaired. A similar committee spent a whole year trying to get seedlings allowed into the kindergarten classrooms. How much lower can you set your sights? The proposal was rejected on safety grounds.

Lizzie’s answer, when asked how she knows something, is ‘I’m a fucking librarian!’, though the days when librarians had privileged access to knowledge are gone for good. One of the distinguishing aspects of ‘21st-century everything’ is that people are inundated with information, much of it suspect, from every direction. Notes at the end of Weather give details for a handful of the citations, but otherwise the attitude to sources is, though short of feral, disinclined to follow the narrow paths of good librarianship. A piece of research or an anecdote is often introduced informally, as something ‘scientists’ or simply ‘they’ say (‘They say when you’re lonely you start to lose words’), as an observation by ‘that famous futurist’ or ‘a famous psychologist’ in 1903. Sometimes no context is offered at all. ‘Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad’ sounds like something Emma Goldman might have said, but it has no attribution. Sometimes a quoted passage – about whether angels need to sleep, for instance (the answer: ‘it is unlikely, though we cannot be completely sure)’ – is presented inside a rectangular border of dots. In effect mise en page is being given an executive function. It’s as if there’s a formula: three dots + quotation in italic + three dots = endorsement. On the other hand: text in roman + dotted border = ridicule. The trouble is that in other passages, such as a dark joke about the philosophy of late capitalism, the same typographical conventions seem to have the opposite meaning.

Not everyone Lizzie deals with shares her preoccupations and values. Her mother is introduced in a paragraph of uninflected compression: ‘My mother calls and speaks to me of the light, the vine, the living bread.’ In the absence of any reaction from Lizzie, or any family history, the tone is unreadable, though probably somewhere on the continuum between exasperation and affection. More fully characterised is her friend Sylvia, an inspirational or perhaps desperational speaker on disaster preparation who hires Lizzie to help answer her emails. Sylvia takes Lizzie and Eli along on one of her ‘going, going, gone trips’, visiting threatened environments or habitats, and isn’t impressed by Eli’s polite lack of interest in a particular type of meadow. ‘Children cannot abide a vista, Sylvia said.’ The artificial isolation on the page of this seven-word paragraph both demands and inhibits a reaction from the reader, but however laconically Sylvia can be supposed to have expressed herself, the reader is powerless to restore the context that has been stripped out. Lizzie may feel in debt to Sylvia, once her teacher in graduate school and the person who pulled strings to get her the job as librarian, but she would be an unusual mother to be short of a defensive response here.

In Christmas Crackers, the entertaining commonplace chapbooks he compiled yearly from 1969 to 2019, John Julius Norwich established as a principle that each quotation, however short, must appear alone on a page. If it couldn’t stand up to that spotlight, it shouldn’t be included. Offill’s marooned paragraphs are bathed in a more forgiving light, but they are still being offered up for individual scrutiny, as things in themselves rather than contributions to a whole. Even when a scene is constructed so as to unfold – when, for instance, Lizzie has a tentatively romantic conversation in a bar with an attractive man she has clocked noticing her – the paragraphs continue to observe social distancing protocols. Any urge on the reader’s part to press on, to link the narrative up and find out what happens next, is hampered by the typography.

A woman called Margot, both Buddhist and ‘shrink’, though possibly herself feral in the eyes of more conventionally accredited practitioners, teaches a meditation class in the basement of the library building. Lizzie, though she doesn’t think of herself as a ‘joiner’, starts to attend. Later, she and her troubled brother, Henry, consult Margot informally in her capacity as a therapist. This makes a sort of sense, since the role Lizzie herself plays with others tends to be that of amateur shrink. Her husband wishes she was a professional: then they’d be rich. At the meditation class her attitude, at least to start with, is sardonic rather than self-suppressing. Her reaction to an exercise one of whose propositions is ‘breathing in, I know that one day I will have to let go of everything and everyone I love’ suggests that serenity is a long way off: ‘Aw, c’mon, man. Everything and everyone I love? Is there one for beginners maybe?’ The New York astringency is deliberately overdone here, but Lizzie isn’t all that far from the young people Sylvia complains about, those who long for transhuman immortality outside the confines of the body but can’t wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee. A fellow student at the meditation class asks Margot a question, or what she imagines to be a question: ‘I have been fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time in the melted ego world. But I find I have trouble coming back to the differentiated world, the one you were just talking about where you have to wash the dishes and take out the garbage.’ Lizzie’s reaction, based on the fact that the speaker is six months pregnant: ‘the differentiated world is coming for your ass.’

Her husband, Ben, provides a contrast both temperamentally and philosophically. He has a doctorate in classics, so that he can act as a conduit for technical terms like anachoresis, meaning ‘retreat into the desert’, or Greek cultural values, such as the central importance of xenia (hospitality), but classics opened no doors for him in career terms, so he has learned to code, and makes a living designing video games. His perspective is stoical, but how could it not be when he reads the actual Stoics before breakfast? He is more phlegmatic than Lizzie even without the benefit of his reading habits, so rich in roughage. Judging by the difference of their backgrounds, they seem to have come a long way to find each other, but this isn’t addressed directly. Lizzie’s mother may have acquired her fervour late in life, but Ben’s Jewish parents must have been fairly traditional to have bought grave plots next to their synagogue in New Jersey, even if they have changed their minds in retirement and are content with a Florida burial. The feelings of either set of parents about the marriage can only be guessed at.

It’s part of the working of the book that information which would normally be considered ‘establishing’ – necessary for a preliminary grasp of the characters and their relationships – arrives too late to perform that function. After a passage describing Jewish folklore and the balance it prescribes between sorrow and joy, as represented by the glass broken at weddings, Lizzie says that she sometimes thinks her family ‘just brought a pile of broken glass to Ben’s doorstep’, but gives no further details. She notes that in Jewish tradition the glass shards are supposed to be kept by the married couple, and used by the survivor to weigh down the eyelids of the one who dies first, and regrets not knowing this earlier: ‘I wish I had kept those shards.’ Is she saying that her wedding followed Jewish tradition though Ben was marrying out, or is this just more overpitched drama? These possibilities take the book in rather different directions, but there’s no way for the reader to decide between them.

In general there’s a sense that Ben is kept in the shadows, in the way that a compulsive blogger might shield a reticent spouse from unwelcome exposure. At one point there’s even a hint of Bridget Jones’s Diary, that parody/pastiche of blogging before there was such a thing, when Lizzie tries to deal with the consequences of a routine rodent infestation in his absence: ‘It’s been an hour already with the yellow gloves and the disinfectant and the wet paper towels and so much throwing away of paper that I’ve already undone all the good I’d done in the world till now.’ Quarter-ounce of mouse dirt on spice rack – one square mile kitchen towel – v. depressed. She asks Ben whether she needs to wash each spice container before putting them back. He says she doesn’t have to, though he does so himself. Ben is nicely present in a scene of undemanding marital intimacy: ‘He runs his hand along my leg in the dark then stops. “Are you wearing my long johns?” “I was cold,” I tell him. We make up a proverb (Married sex is like taking off your own pants), fool around, go to sleep happy.’ The curious thing here isn’t the peripheral positioning of Ben in the book but the peripheral positioning of Lizzie herself. Details about Ben gradually accrete, for instance that his surname is half as long as his grandfather’s, brusquely trimmed at Ellis Island. Nothing substantiates Lizzie with a history or a context.

The relationship between Lizzie and her struggling brother, Henry, is closer to the conventionally novelistic than the other parts of the book. Even so, areas are left blank. Lizzie plays what is by any reckoning a big sister role, not just familiar with Henry’s weaknesses but able to anticipate them. When Ben is on vacation with Eli, having made good on a gentle threat that a family holiday will take place whether or not Lizzie comes along, Offill gives her narrator a sentence of apparent regret: ‘Later, in the middle of the night, I start worrying about him. Thinking about things I should have said.’ The pronoun would naturally refer to Ben, the last male person she was thinking about, in a passage two pages earlier: ‘I’m starting to miss him. The warm hum of his body next to me in bed. Certain little jokes and kindnesses.’ In fact Lizzie is thinking about Henry, as becomes clear when the passage about night worries continues: ‘I know the things you are supposed to look for. I grew up with the list in my head.’ Her relationship with a damaged brother not only precedes but seems to outrank her marriage. It certainly changed the direction of her life just as fundamentally: ‘Last time Henry was drowning, I dove in right after him. I left school and never went back again. Henry had stopped working. He wasn’t seeing anyone. He just stayed in that apartment in Staten Island, high, until he ran out of drugs and had to go down the street to get some more.’ That Henry is the older sibling is not something that could have been deduced from information earlier in the book. In fact, a passage near the beginning, about Henry’s beauty as a child, seems like the fractionally jealous memory of an older sister missing out on compliments: ‘People used to stop my mother on the street. What a waste, they’d say. Eyelashes like that on a boy!’ The withholding of personal presence in a first-person narrative, leaving the reader to connect the dots, is a manoeuvre that carries risks. Its benefits are anybody’s guess.

Lizzie’s sacrifice of her education seems a big weight to carry, seen from either side of the bargain. A therapist might suggest that her response to crisis, however tenderly motivated, has institutionalised a distorted sibling relationship. A reader is more likely to take the passage about Lizzie’s worries as a sign of the novel’s weak construction rather than a revelation of character. Rather earlier in the book, Lizzie told Margot she felt close to Henry, and Margot replies that a more appropriate word would be ‘enmeshed’. Later on the same page comes this paragraph: ‘Do you ever take on the burdens of others? is question five on the enmeshment questionnaire.’ So Margot’s remark struck Lizzie forcefully enough for her to pursue the possibility, but the reaction she had at the time of hearing Margot’s remark is omitted. There’s no tracing of Lizzie’s thoughts and feelings between suggestion and questionnaire, though how to find an enmeshment questionnaire seems promising territory for a novelist.

In the passages about her flirtation with Will, an attractive man Lizzie at first assumes can have no interest in her, the tone itself flirts with cuteness. He’s a globetrotting war correspondent (she doesn’t scold him about his carbon footprint) who flinches protectively when, on a rare walk, she steps off the pavement and onto the grass, because he’s so habituated to roadside IEDs. She asks him if he’s a spy and he says no, adding adorably: ‘But I could send you a message in code.’ In effect he does, giving her a 1931 book on maritime signals, with a handful of entries flagged up by a tiny pencil mark. These include ‘I wish to communicate with you’ and ‘I am on fire.’ There hasn’t been so dashing a male fantasy figure, both footloose and dependable, since Robert Kincaid in The Bridges of Madison County. When not working in war zones, he takes children on wilderness trips and encourages them to practise ‘loss-proofing’. The key to individual survival is prioritising the needs of the group. Not everything is an emergency, though. ‘“No set line between lost and not lost,” he tells me, and I write this down on a napkin.’ He fills not only her heart but her commonplace book. If Will could accept the conditions Lizzie was used to – that they’d be looking after her mother and brother’s needs for the rest of their lives – then she’d ‘happily fuck him whichever way until the bright morn’. There’s an extraordinary contortion of tone in that last piece of phrasing, wish-fulfilment and sardonic dismissal wrenched together until it’s impossible to say whether this is a spoof or a sidelong approach to the real thing, chick lit by stealth.

Offill​ has made the decision on Lizzie’s behalf to withhold the name of the winner of the 2016 election, emulating the way Voldemort’s name is rationed in the Harry Potter books, as if the single plump syllable had a taboo spell on it. The idea may be to refuse to grant the name power, a quixotic argument since power is what Trump has. The effect – ‘He wants to build a wall. It will have a beautiful door, he says’ – isn’t to shrink Trump to his proper dimensions but to make recent history unrecognisable. How far is this from the sort of climate change denialism that all the people in the book would regard as criminally irresponsible? The election is certainly consequential for them. Lizzie and Ben even consider moving to Israel, as a result of the abrupt cultural inhospitability of America. Sylvia, who is described early on as careful to include an ‘obligatory note of hope’ in her presentations, now despairs of raising the environmental alarm: ‘there’s no hope any more, only witness.’ This is complicated by the fact that obligatorynoteofhope.com, whose address is included at the end of the book between the text and the acknowledgments, is a website set up by Offill. It directs interested parties to organisations of resistance, preparation or direct action such as Transition Towns and Extinction Rebellion.

Lizzie’s mother seems to be galvanised rather than paralysed by the political cataclysm: ‘She took a bus with her prayer group to a detention centre in the next state. They were not allowed to talk to the people being held there, but they stood outside the barbed wire fence and sang in hopes of cheering them.’ In a world where introducing seedlings into kindergarten classrooms is impossible this doesn’t qualify as an entirely futile activity. A group of detainees was encouraged to feel less than hated. Yet Lizzie makes no comment, and this is the baffling thing about Offill’s book: the excision of connective tissue from a novel dedicated to the importance of linking things up, however unbearable the process may be.

One recurring pattern in the novel is the truncation of a scene so that a privileged element hangs in the air and is left to resonate. This mannerism seems particularly out of place when a conversation with Eli is arbitrarily arrested, since so much of Lizzie’s thinking and feeling is to do with her child and how to prepare him for disaster. (It’s odd not to be told Eli’s age, but no odder than being kept in the dark about the name of the family dog.) In the dollar store Eli asks who made all the things on the shelves. ‘“The Invisible Hand,” I tell him.’ And we cut to white space. Were there really no follow-up questions? Did you explain about capitalism and how it is killing the world, or just go home in triumph with your plastic colander? Eli takes an interest in robots and Lizzie finds him watching a video about one called Samantha. ‘She is made to look like a human and has two settings, the inventor says. In sex mode, she can moan when you touch her breasts. In family mode, she can tell jokes or talk about philosophy.’ End of section. If child-rearing in a time of crisis is to be part of the substance of your book, to abridge a scene in which the heroine explains (we assume) the destructive workings of sexism and/or technology is bizarre. What ends up being highlighted, particularly when the material concerns Eli, isn’t the self-sufficiency of the anecdote but the arbitrariness of its cutting off.

Blank space, a primary if easily overlooked constituent of the look of a page, is capable of producing powerful effects. The only inevitable reinforcement of cadence by white space takes place on a book’s last page – there’s a thunderous memorability to the last sentences of, say, Sabbath’s Theater, House of Meetings or The Leopard – unless the writer conspires with the production team to take the text to the very bottom of a recto page, or follows the Ouroboros strategy Joyce used in Finnegans Wake, with the last words on the last page grammatically completed by the first words on the first.

Absence of comment is itself a form of commentary. Section endings, of which there can be half a dozen on a single page of Weather, intensify the flavour of what went immediately before, the last paragraph, last sentence, or last phrase. If the effect isn’t of a sprinkling of salt (wit) or a squeeze of lemon juice (irony) it will be a sprinkling of sugar. There isn’t a lot of wit on show in Offill’s novel, and the irony is sometimes adolescent in character. ‘He’ (You Know Who, He Who Must Not Be Named) is talking about something in space, perhaps his desire to establish a space force. Still, ‘Today Nasa found seven new Earth-size planets. So there’s that.’ Lizzie’s mother plans to make a four-hour drive to a university dental clinic, one so overwhelmed by demand that ‘there is a lottery system to see who gets to have their pain taken away. America is the name of this place where you can win big.’ The negativity here is curiously smug. Irony that shuts down a political reaction can hardly be described as searching.

In Weather, irony often seems more of a reflex than an authentic response. Here Lizzie contemplates a dramatic shift in behaviour (the context, left implicit, is her fear that the new administration will overturn Roe v. Wade and deny women legal access to abortion): ‘Women of reproductive age are being urged to get IUDs. They can last six to twelve years and so might outlast the shuttering of the clinics. But it’s suddenly hard to get in to see a doctor; the appointments are all booked for months and the waiting rooms at the walk-in clinics are full of nervous white women.’ It’s that last phrase that seems so mean-minded. Lizzie has no knowledge of the racial composition of the women in the waiting rooms, but edges a concern with reproductive autonomy towards the category of ‘First World problem’. Sometimes it’s better to leave the lemon squeezer alone.

The hierarchy of visual pauses in Weather is hard to calibrate, from the standard two-line interval to the doubled distance with triple dot to the dotted border and finally to the definitive break between the numbered sections. The organisation into sections is puzzling in itself. The last two (Five and Six) occupy barely 15 pages between them, though there’s no sense of accelerated movement; the first section takes up 65. Here’s the way that section ends: ‘A man calls in from Dallas. What do you mean interconnected? he says. There is a pause and then the ecologist speaks: There is a species of moth in Madagascar that drinks the tears of sleeping birds.’ So the last words of the section go to a speaker on the radio, in a sugar-dusted moment perhaps made sickly by familiarity. After all, the entomologist Pilcher in The Silence of the Lambs drew Agent Starling’s attention to the fact that there was ‘a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears’, and the character of Mason Verger in Thomas Harris’s sequel Hannibal drinks martinis flavoured with the tears of mistreated orphans. Still, the point is that a sense of interconnectedness is a good thing, right up to the moment when it becomes the bad thing called enmeshment. Or perhaps there’s no fixed line between interconnectedness and enmeshment. You decide.

Margot with her Buddhism and her therapy speaks for internal change, while Sylvia stakes everything on making a measurable difference, and finds it hard to function when she loses faith in that possibility. If the subject of the book is climate change, Margot’s counsel is no more than denial tricked out with psychological insights, anachoresis not as a retreat into the desert (or an imaginary oasis) but as biologists use the word: the survival strategy of lurking in a hole. As the book goes on, the welcome snarky tone of the differentiated-world passage gives way to one that is almost New Agey. How about this observation, presented in the book’s unvarying way as a self-sufficient proposition? ‘In some Zen monasteries, gossip is defined as talking about anything not directly in one’s gaze.’ By that definition, any mention of global warming must also count as gossip. Ten pages further on, it seems that the mischievous spell cast in Margot’s class has boomeranged, and the melted ego world is now coming for Lizzie: ‘And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.’

Is it possible to find an adequate tone or combination of tones, an adequate form or combination of forms, for the purpose of contemplating extinction? If the whole of culture is an attempt to deny the reality of (individual) death, then the answer would have to be no, but it’s impossible not to keep on trying. Failure comes with the territory, yet the failures in Offill’s novel are of a different character. It’s rare to find such a programmatic opposition between the procedures of a book and the values behind it. How can an aesthetic that exalts the fragment serve the human agenda of reconnecting us with the terrible things we would rather not think about?