Lizzie responds, “‘you are not going to have to walk thirty-four miles with your child on your back,’…’But if I did’, he says.” But if I did shows up later on in the novel, reasserting this fear that Lizzie and her brother share about their inability to save their loved ones from the wreckage. When Lizzie’s brother, Henry, watches a video about a refugee mother who had to carry her child on her back for thirty-four miles to reach a camp, Henry worries that he would not be strong enough to do that for his own newborn child.

Lizzie becomes engulfed in a terror that is at once deeply personal and universal: the impending collapse of the universe and human civilization, and her inability to protect her family from it. (Meeting her brother for dinner, Lizzie remarks,”I remind myself never to become so addicted to drugs or alcohol that I’m not allowed to use them.”) Lizzie’s therapist remarks that she is “enmeshed” with her troubled brother, and in many ways these two characters form a sort of doomsday duo-sharing an existential anxiety about protecting their progeny.

It is revealed that Lizzie was forced to drop out of grad school to deal with an episode relating to her drug addict brother, who descends into relapse at the birth of his child and new marriage to a woman struggling with similar demons. The audience questions that Lizzie responds to include, “What will disappear from stores first?”, “Why do humans need myths?”, or “What is surveillance capitalism?” This podcast, with episode titles like “The Center Cannot Hold”, features interviews with various climate scientists and cultural figures discussing the decline of civilization. The novel centers around Lizzie, a grad-school dropout turned college librarian living with her husband and son in Brooklyn, whose sides hustle is responding to audience letters sent into her former mentor’s climate change-themed podcast. (A woman who nearly hits a family of pedestrians with her car mumbles, “You and your precious lives”). Like Offill’s bestselling Department of Speculation, the novel is structured in diary-like paragraphs, or quick thought bursts featuring some of Offill’s classic one liners.

Weather, the latest novel from Jenny Offill, leans into the impending doom.

Weather jenny offill