Cold New Climate by Isobel Wohl
Review by Gary Kaill
Readers familiar with the work of Isobel Wohl will surely be intrigued by her switch to the long form. The enigmatic title of her 2019 debut, Winter Strangers, seemed to perfectly encapsulate the chilly oeuvre of that slim but weighty collection. Here was a writer who took a finely honed blade to the narratives within, stripping its intimate tales back to the fitful ridiculousness of circumstance, presenting characters in an often unsettling transit. Wohl emerged as an artist blessed with an acutely modernist curiosity: about our collapsing world, about people and how they behaved on the page.
The story ‘Gels’, for example, appears to be little more than a first-person recount by an unnamed woman of a day spent travelling to and through an airport, flying to meet her lover, and finding herself waiting for him in an unfamiliar bar:
‘The woman said, Patrick is working up there at Dunmore.
I know that, said the man. I know everything.
You do, yeah?
Of course I do.
I looked at the man who knew everything. He was looking at the woman who knew about Patrick. The barman counted out change as a series of flat clicks. I wondered how well he took care of his fingernails. As I finished my drink I got a text from you saying that you were at the house and that I should come home, so I did.’
The language at first comes off as somewhat parched, overly particular, and maybe a little self-aware. The reader, for once, is not being asked to notice — and approve or admire — the traditional detailing. Far more involving for us, the book seems to be saying, to be pointed back towards the woman ‘who knew about Patrick’ rather than the woman with, say, blonde curls. The sense of something being withheld — or perhaps, just being dismissed. Wohl’s form of address, the relationship she is choosing to build with her reader, is at once distinct and rather disorienting. But once you fall in step with its shape and rhythm, you learn to see more clearly its function and its reach.
In Cold New Climate, the first title to be published by the intriguing new press Weatherglass Books, and Wohl’s debut novel, the tenor of her discomfiting narratives remain. But key to the success of her switch to the long form is how she flexes to fit, but also to take advantage of, the opportunities the format provides. Wohl thrives in this new space, and she allows her protagonists room to reflect, report the world around them in ways that they did not always in the stories in Winter Strangers and, crucially, provide the reader with an immediately richer experience.
That experience is largely led by the action of Lydia, a designer in her late thirties, whose relationship with her older partner Tom (‘When Lydia met Tom she was very young and he was middle-aged and knew Italian.’) has left her listless and in need of space. She heads to the Greek island of Evia, leaving behind Tom and his nineteen-year-old son Caleb, but she remains unsettled: her work does not go well; she struggles to acclimatise fully and often finds herself lost; she has a strange one-night stand with an Australian man. She decides, without any real consideration to return home to New York, after less than a month away. The whole experience appears to have achieved little. A problem, though: in the interim, Tom, encouraged by her unthinking suggestion that they might consider seeing other people, has met and fallen in love with Diane, an academic colleague closer to his own age.
‘Tom said it as he was pouring the wine. Tom asked her to tell him about Greece and then said it and says it again when Lydia thinks or drinks or turns over in the hotel bed.
I was going to wait to tell you but I can’t wait. I’m sorry. It was completely unexpected. I thought you were going to leave.
Now Lydia opens her mouth and inhales. Air settles on her tongue and stings.’
What happens next… well.
What happens next is remarkable; it is difficult to claim that it is entirely unexpected, but its size and weight feel almost ill-fitting in a novel that (so far) has been quietly observed, concerned with the barely visible, those accumulated relationship bindings known but often unnameable. And, yes, it seems odd to ponder the correctness of sharing a plot point that occurs a mere third of the way into the book (particularly when other outlets, in reviewing Cold New Climate, have been indiscreet to the point of also revealing the story’s rug-pull coda.) But Wohl’s skill as a dramatist ensures a seamless transition into the events that spur the novel’s gripping second and third acts.
Wohl has achieved something significant here. Cold New Climate is a difficult book, powered by a complex and troubling protagonist —her actions, and her often sour demeanour, will prove a stretch for some. But the book succeeds on its own unflinching terms. Its early chapters, those set in Greece and New York, succeed in building a sense of dread that clings to the skin; its closing section, a Midwest, small-town odyssey that plunges key characters into a desperate race against time, is, for the most part, as moving as it disturbing.
How coolly Wohl manages the demands of her plot, how well she maintains a sly authorial distance as events develop. Aside the delights of her sharply crafted prose (‘Other nights the eager weather enters hotly through the window and sometimes a slight breeze follows as consolation.’), once the book is closed, it is the deftness with which Wohl sketches the fractured pathologies of a family crisis in extremis that remains. As an examination of the consequences of shocking, fateful acts, Cold New Climate speaks with such authority. Its verdict, as is so often the case, may ultimately not penetrate much deeper than ‘we’re all fucked, but some of us are less fucked than others’, but the book’s fearless worldview is matched by an implacable humanism. A stirring and accomplished debut from an essential new voice, Cold New Climate questions what it is we need to stay alive; it dares recast what it is to be human. Reserve a space on those end-of-year lists now.
Cold New Climate is published by Weatherglass Books, 15th April 2021