Reading Jenny Offill’s The Dept of Speculation and then Weather, I spent a lot of time flicking back to check I hadn’t missed some crucial detail. I never had—the narrative is just elusive like that. Flicking back and forth through pages can feel a bit shameful or naughty—like you’ve not been paying attention—but in this case, the constant feeling of wondering What is going on? points to exactly what makes these books good. Actually, What is going on? sounds like one of the disembodied voices that constantly interrupts Offill’s narrator. The protagonists—characters who must be at least partly auto-fictional—are unable to get through most pages without having their thoughts hijacked or deviated by some external voice.
I’d heard Offill’s books described as x-rays or as novels that look like poetry and I was intrigued. I like the idea of a story that’s been stripped not just of the extra fat but of the muscles, nervous system, and cartilage. Offill herself has expressed surprise that her experimental style found such mainstream success. In a way, it is surprising. But Offill’s stories are about daily life—the minutiae of loving, having babies, and working—and something about the hyperactive-cum-dreamy rhythm of her short, rolling paragraphs feels closer to everyday life than a lot of more straightforward fiction. There is something very natural about the experience of reading these books, even if you don’t always know what’s going on. Offill is doing something exciting; she’s finding a way to write that bothers to engage not just with the content of everyday life, but with the rhythms of it, and the ways in which our cognitive processes are shaped by the technology around us, by the fact that we are constantly bombarded with information.
By taking this fragmentary route over one of exposition and lengthy description, Offill hovers just above the dividing line between poetry and fiction; the text doesn’t seem to mind if we don’t understand. The language is pared back, yet multi-vocal. It ventriloquises, making you feel like you’re on a crowded subway in New York, while the interruptions themselves—ringing with the cloying chirp of self-help clickbait—make you feel like you are inside your phone, internalising linguistic shrapnel that’s coming at you from all directions.
Weather is extremely funny. Lizzie—who is a librarian—receives a guide, “Tips for Dealing with Problem Patrons”, which breaks said patrons down into a list of categories: “malodorous, humming, laughing, defacing, laundering, combative, chattering, lonely, coughing”. And honestly, no full-sentence description could have done a better job of conjuring the rooms of a New York public library. Then—another laugh out loud moment towards the end of the book—Lizzie realises that her successful and lengthy campaign of avoiding Nicola (mother of Kasper, who carries around flashcards of French vocabulary) has only been so successful because Nicola has been avoiding her in return.
Where the Dept of Speculation takes itself a little seriously, Weather is entirely unpretentious. I really enjoyed it, not least because it is proof of the fact that wider audiences will embrace experimental fiction if it’s done for a reason. Some stories—the ones about everyday life in late-Capitalist societies—require experimentation to be told properly.
[January 2021]
t-barnes 