BmoreArt

Collective dread creeps into Lizzie, despite being armed with an exacting, sardonic voice that made me snort aloud in several instances. Of late, listener questions have grown desperate, from “What is the philosophy of late capitalism?” to “What are the best ways to prepare my children for the coming chaos?” Lizzie’s reply to the latter: “You can teach them to sew, to farm, to build. Techniques for calming a fearful mind might be the most useful though.”

Sure, the planet is in trouble, but the demands of daily life continue. As a librarian in the university where she squandered her doctorate, Lizzie pulls books for the likes of a “doomed adjunct” who “has been working on his dissertation for eleven years.” In the mornings, she goes to battle against “the woman with the bullhorn” barring parents from entering her son Eli’s school building, and wonders what the other mothers think of her “drab clothes and fancy glasses.” At night, she and her husband, Ben, a Classics PhD turned video game designer, contrive intimacy by buoying made-up proverbs such as “Married sex is like taking off your own pants.”

Offill props character neuroses against the backdrop of a world in turmoil, one that nags us from the palm of our hand. With our devices, we’re hyperconnected yet physically distant, shackled by our plain mortality, our corporeal selves. There’s always a faraway genocide, an endless war, a social cause to stand for. Yet how absurd to imagine that sipping from a single plastic straw has ramifications beyond us. “There are fewer and fewer birds these days. This is the hole I tumbled down an hour ago,” Lizzie muses in a rare moment of peace. “I finally stop clicking when my mother calls.”

Lizzie is most burdened by these earthly concerns when coming to the aid of her brother, Henry. An obsessive viewer of refugee crisis videos and the TV show My Strange Addiction, Henry’s anxieties range from the self-deprecating to the deranged. He’s convinced he signed his soul to the devil as a child, and cleans his newborn daughter with a squirt gun to avoid hurting her. Every some-odd month, Henry misses how drugs make “the world stop calling to him,” and compels Lizzie to pull him from the depths of relapse.

Clinging is a running motif in Weather. Lizzie lingers at her former university, and haunts the neighborhood bar where she once worked. The owner of a bodega she frequents fosters a street cat because “his wife no longer loves him.” Lizzie’s aging mother, a dependent of the crumbling American welfare system, nourishes herself with “the light, the vine, the living bread.” A woman in Lizzie’s meditation class counts down her steps toward enlightenment. She’s on her second to last, described by a Japanese word that means, “bucket of black paint.”

Do our fixations prepare us for disaster, or just fill the time until it comes? Offill eschews any satisfying answer. A six-month sobriety chip, a mouth guard for nighttime grinding, will have to do for now. Elsewhere, Lizzie wonders if there’s higher good in our devotion to each other. “The core delusion is that I am here and you are there,” is her shrewd parting thought. Perhaps it is not so radical to say we are all we need.

“Of course, the world continues to end,” Sylvia says to Lizzie after a long hiatus from the podcast. Then she gets off the phone to water her garden.

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