Dept. of Speculation
JENNY OFFILL
Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. $22.95, 192 pages.
Weather
JENNY OFFILL
Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. $23.95, 224 pages.
“I TELL HER that I’ve been thinking that we should buy land somewhere colder.” Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s 2020 novel Weather, recounts a lunch with her boss, Sylvia, in a Manhattan restaurant. Lizzie is mother to a school-aged son, Eli, and new aunt to an infant named Iris. Sylvia is a climate change expert, a regular on the lecture circuit and host of a popular podcast called Hell and High Water. She has no children. “If climate departure happens in New York when predicted,” Lizzie continues, “Eli and Iris could—” But Sylvia cuts in: “Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?”
Weather is Offill’s second novel with questions of creation, crisis, and motherhood at its center. The first, 2014’s Dept. of Speculation, shares with Weather a fragmentary style, the narratives told in brief snippets of dialogue and sparsely drawn vignettes. Both novels are mostly set in New York. Both narrators are writers who teach and take on side work to keep their households afloat. Both are mothers. Both books thrum with tension between the need to make meaning through art and to make (and protect) a next generation to carry it forward. And both are novels about calamity. In Dept. of Speculation, the crisis is an affair, stormy emotional skies that the narrator refers to as “weather.” In Weather, the crisis is the climate, “the invisible horsemen galloping toward” Sylvia and Lizzie in their Manhattan bar.
and join a growing genre of writing about the choice to create children. Some, like Sheila Heti’s 2018 novel are told from the “before” side of that choice, and contemplate the loss of space for writing, for art, for self that may come with parenthood. In others, like Offill’s, the die is already cast, children are already had, that space already taken. Read together, Offill’s novels offer spare, elliptical meditations on the fraught nature of creation, biological and
