Offill made her name with her second book, “Dept. of Speculation,” a viciously funny philosophical novel of ideas smuggled into a story of new motherhood and marital infidelity. In her new novel, “Weather,” Offill applies her instruments — the fragment, the odd fact, her deep banks of knowledge on mysticism and natural history — to a broader canvas. The stakes are the survival not of a marriage but of the planet itself. “The question I was thinking about in this book,” she told me, “was, Can you still just tend your own garden once you know about the fire outside its walls?”
We were standing in her home office. She pulled books from a shelf as if appending footnotes to our conversation, piling them high on the small bed between us. Look at this, and this: a novel by the German writer Christa Wolf; a “Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Survival Manual”; a moss-green hardback, “Cold Meat and How to Disguise It: A History of Advice on How to Survive Hard Times.”
Her desk faced a hill covered with exposed roots and brambles. If the symbolism isn’t obvious enough for a writer of her precision and exacting slowness, consider also the small painting on the sill, of a man walking a snail on a leash. On the desk lay neatly stacked academic studies about the psychology of denial and accounts of polar exploration. A small sign hung on the door bearing a Kafka quote: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
A boat, like a piece of writing, is first of all conceived as a structure. Whether it is a cargo ship, an ocean liner, a ferry, or a pleasure boat, each has a primary function, a part to play. Its purpose defines its size, its shape, and its overall dimensions. When I write, I proceed in the same manner. The form—short story, novel—must be fitting for the story I want to tell. Its architecture underpins the words. It is with this specific aim that I divide it up and seek a balance. Each part, each chapter, has its own function. Just as the engine powers the boat, as the bow cleaves through the waves, and the keel ensures the stability, even the shortest paragraph fulfils a certain purpose. In my case, the engineer endows the writer with a desire for efficiency.
Each new crisis follows a familiar playbook, as scientists, epidemiologists, health-care workers, and politicians race to characterize and contain the new threat. Each epidemic is also different, and each is a mirror that reflects the society it affects. In the new coronavirus, we see a world that is more connected than ever by international travel, but that has also succumbed to growing isolationism and xenophobia. We see a time when scientific research and the demand for news, the spread of misinformation and the spread of a virus, all happen at a relentless, blistering pace. The new crisis is very much the kind of epidemic we should expect, given the state of the world in 2020. “It’s almost as if the content is the same but the amplitude is different,” Bhadelia said. “There’s just a gre ater frenzy, and is that a function of the disease, or a function of the changed world? It’s unclear.”
The scientists dragged a net through the remaining water in four areas of the reserve. With the help of a small aluminum boat and a pool scooper, they caught two males and five females. The animals were placed into cotton pillowcases, then given health checks — while suspended upside down by their tails — and driven to the zoo in Sydney, where they will probably remain for months, until enough rain has fallen to replenish Tidbinbilla’s supplies.
One of the biggest issues facing the zoo was that other reserves were asking them to rescue their platypuses, too, but Taronga didn’t yet have the space. “I don’t think drought and bushfires are going away,” Dr. Meagher said. “We have to prepare for these types of climatic disasters moving forward more and more.” She was spending her days asking, “How do we have the resources to be able to say, ‘All right, let’s go rescue 50 platypus’?”
Food can’t solve every problem. But delivering a homemade dish or edible gift to someone’s door is a concrete response to the sometimes hard-to-answer question of “What can I do to help?”
Gaffney, a seasoned horse trainer in northern New Mexico, gets a call out of the blue one day from a nearby ranch that is run as an alternative to incarceration. The ranch has a small herd of horses cared for by a livestock crew, with the aim of instilling work skills, but the horses have been harshly treated. One has been severely wounded in an accident, and they have been running wild and attacking people. Gaffney has never heard the kinds of stories she’s told over the phone. What she finds on the ranch is a group of damaged people and a group of damaged horses. The book documents a year and a half of finding deep connection and even communion with both.
Strange Hotel oscillates between a kind of obsessional neurosis – a fixation on repetition and control – and neurasthenia, a deadening, fatigued inability to act. Those twinned emotional states transmit themselves to the reader, who worries away at what meaning is being suggested, while also wondering if the attempt is designed and destined not to bear fruit.
We may have better science than the Renaissance, but we still have no medicine or magic capable of divining our leaders’ souls. And yet now, as then, the fate of the realm depends upon such knowledge.
That un-nameable desire to travel a different path led Eisenberg to Pocahontas County and, ultimately, to write this evocative story of two other restless young women — sisters of the road — who passed through decades earlier and, sadly, never left.