{"id":2662,"date":"2020-06-15T15:10:12","date_gmt":"2020-06-15T22:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=2662"},"modified":"2020-06-15T15:10:12","modified_gmt":"2020-06-15T22:10:12","slug":"a-storm-brewing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=2662","title":{"rendered":"A storm brewing…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WEATHER. By Jenny Offill. Alfred A.\u00a0\u00a0Knopf. 224 pages. $23.95.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Lucy toggles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cToggles\u201d is the word author Jenny Offill used in a recent interview to describe the interior switching in the life of her narrator. In this remarkable exploration of the effect of climate change on a woman\u2019s life, Lucy moves back and forth between two worlds. On one hand, she does the stuff we all have to do to stay alive. She\u2019s a wife and mother who plays with her child, fixes meals for the family, works as a librarian at the college where she didn\u2019t finish her dissertation. She assists her mentor, a \u201cprepper\u201d guru, with her correspondence, takes a car service to work, even though she can\u2019t afford it, and she meets a man on the bus, flirts with him, but doesn\u2019t go any further. She counsels her mother, tries to help her addictive brother, and gives the woman outside her library money<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, she has a preoccupation \u2013 Weather<\/em>. The dilemma of living ethically in a damaged world consumes her from time to time, even moment to moment. The guy she meets on the bus asks her what she\u2019s afraid of; she answers \u201c\u2026 dentistry, humiliation, scarcity. \u201d  She overhears someone on the bus say it\u2019s important to be on the alert for \u201dthe decisive moment. \u201d He\u2019s talking about 20th<\/sup> century photography, but she\u2019s \u201c\u2026 talking bout twenty-first century everything. \u201d When asked what she\u2019s good at, she rattles off a full page of survival skills. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These thoughts surface, in what passes for a narrative here, as fragments. A signature of Offill\u2019s style, used to great effect in her previous novel Dept.  Of<\/em> Speculation<\/em>, these fragments can be as short as a random fact about the weather, or as lengthy as an entire domestic scene. Quotes from her mentor\u2019s lectures, questions from correspondence, even a joke surface in Lucy\u2019s consciousness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 The sometimes heavy, sometimes humorous episodes produce a sense of urgency contrasting with a normalcy of inaction, and, ultimately, a disintegrating narrative. The flicking back and forth builds to an unresolved tension at the end of the book, an anxiety not just for Lucy, but also for the reader \u2013 how responsible are we for the whole world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weather<\/em> is a book of our time, for our time.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer WEATHER. By Jenny Offill. Alfred A.\u00a0\u00a0Knopf. 224 pages. $23.95. Lucy toggles. \u201cToggles\u201d is the word author Jenny Offill used in a recent interview to describe the interior switching in the life of her narrator. In this remarkable exploration of the effect of climate change on a woman\u2019s life, Lucy moves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[634,1155],"class_list":["post-2662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","tag-jenny-offill","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2664,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662\/revisions\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}