The Ten Best Weather Events in Fiction

There are many ways to organize a bookshelf—by author, title, genre, date of publication, color, size—but, prior to writing about the role of weather in literature for the magazine this week, it had never occurred to me to mentally rearrange my shelves by meteorological phenomena. Once I started thinking that way, though, I couldn’t stop. Jane Bennet is thrown into the company of her future husband by a rainstorm; a drought prompts the Joad family to migrate west in “Grapes of Wrath”; a possessed child seems to conjure a storm in “The Turn of the Screw”; the underdressed clerk in Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” likely wouldn’t crave that garment so desperately if winters in St. Petersburg weren’t bitterly cold.

Fictional rain, fictional drought, fictional storms, fictional cold: having wandered into this obsession with imaginary weather, I figured I might as well try to find the most interesting instances of it. Some literary weather events advertise their centrality right up front: the snow in Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow,” the typhoon in Joseph Conrad’s “Typhoon,” the tempest in “The Tempest.” But most fictional weather, like most real weather, is passing. I wanted scenes that were more enduring, either because the writing in them was extraordinary or because they were critical to the plot. I narrowed the scope to novels written for adults, even though that meant losing King Lear on the moor and Bartholomew in the oobleck, not to mention a whole lot of wonderful weather in poetry: T. S. Eliot’s cat-like fog, Wallace Stevens’s “mind of winter,” Emily Dickinson’s snow that “sifts from leaden sieves,” and—the most painful cut—the sublime cold in Auden’s “Elegy for Yeats.” (“The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. / What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.”) Still, that left entire almanacs’ worth of weather scenes to choose from. With apologies in advance for the many I doubtless forgot, here, in no particular order, are some of my favorite meteorological moments in literature.

1. The hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes were Watching God.”

The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

In 1928, a hurricane devastated the Florida Everglades—an event that, as fictionalized by Hurston, gave her novel both its title and its central calamity. In the tense hours before the storm strikes, the rabbits and possums and rattlesnakes near Lake Okeechobee begin to flee, while the people in the nearby shantytowns crouch down and wait. First comes the wind, then the rain, then something worse: as Tea Cake, the doomed husband of Janie Crawford, the protagonist, says, “De lake is comin’!” Like Birnam Wood making its way to Dunsinane, a fixed landscape feature has begun to move—an event that should be impossible, and will be tragic.

2. The thunder in Herman Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man.”

Hark, what Himalayas of concussions!

Thunder in literature is mostly figurative; characters, angry or imperious, thunder their lines all the time. But of its various literal appearances—from the cosmic game of ninepins in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” to the “dry sterile thunder without rain” in T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”—I like none so much as this line from a little-known Melville story. It is spoken by a lightning-rod salesman, out hawking his wares in the middle of a storm, to try to terrify a potential customer into an impulse purchase. As such, it is both histrionic and comic—yet for all that, it remains a terrific description of thunder. For just a moment, sound waves solidify, and the world’s most foreboding mountains reverberate in the sky.

3. The lightning in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three …

I have sung the praises of this phrase before, as the greatest parenthetical aside in literature. So perhaps I should have looked elsewhere for an exemplary lightning bolt, but to my knowledge there is none finer in all of fiction. (I exclude, on the grounds that it is only a simulacrum, Harry Potter’s scar.) Nabokov’s lightning is mimetic: like the real thing, it flashes down into the middle of the sentence out of nowhere—swift, supercharged, brilliant.

4. The mud in Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.”

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Dickens’s novel is best known for its fog, which throws London into the same state of murky obscurity as the British legal system. But I am a partisan of its mud, which flows down every thoroughfare, squelches around every boot, saddles the poor street-cleaner Jo with a Sisyphean task, and, best of all, provides the excuse for a Megalosaurus to lumber across the book’s opening paragraph—the first sighting of such a creature in England in a hundred and sixty-six million years, and the weirdest walk-on in all of Victorian literature.

5. The cyclone in Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila.”

Doane said once that he saw a cyclone cross a river. It took the water in its path up into itself and crossed on dry ground, and it was just as white as a cloud, white as snow. Something like that would only last for a minute, but it showed you what kind of thing can happen.

Okay, yes, of course: the most famous cyclone in fiction is the one that carries Dorothy off to Oz—the only instance, so far as I know, of weather functioning (à la wardrobes and tollbooths) as a portal to an imaginary world. For literary magnificence, though, my vote goes to this passage in “Lila.” Like the book itself, it involves a collision of humble people and wonders of Biblical proportions; also, of the vernacular, the factual, and the astonishing. In a different way than L. Frank Baum, but no less remarkably, Robinson uses a cyclone to transport us to a place of wonder.

6. The snow in James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. . . . Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Snow falls all over fiction, often to unwelcome ends. It kills a man in Annie Proulx’s “The Half-Skinned Steer,” fosters Jack Torrance’s famous case of cabin fever in Stephen King’s “The Shining,” thwarts a pair of eloping lovers in Pushkin’s “The Blizzard,” and covers every road, rooftop, hat brim, and windowpane in Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago.” (For latitudinal reasons, there might not be a major work of Russian literature in which it doesn’t snow.) But my favorite fictional snowstorm is the one that forms the final lines of the final story in Joyce’s “Dubliners.” After an evening spent caught up in the vivid particulars of social life—a Christmas party, a public speech, a surge of unrequited longing for his wife—the main character watches the snow drifting downward and follows suit, into a calm and lovely melancholy. The storm out of the window becomes “general all over Ireland,” all over the globe, all over the universe; as the scale expands, the human world, lately so all-consuming, recedes.

7. The storm in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.”

About midnight, while we still sat up, the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the other split a tree off at the corner of the building: a huge bough fell across the roof, and knocked down a portion of the east chimney-stack, sending a clatter of stones and soot into the kitchen-fire.

Which storm in “Wuthering Heights,” you might reasonably ask? The novel is full of wild weather; the word “wuthering” itself is, Bronte tells us, “descriptive of the atmospheric tumult” on the Yorkshire moors. In the above passage, a particularly frightful storm strikes on the night that the young Heathcliff runs away from the home he shares with Catherine Earnshaw—a severing so drastic that it breaks the very building. But, of course, nothing ever truly severs their relationship, which is the “atmospheric tumult” in Yorkshire: part romance, part ghost story, entirely elemental, and, after Lear on the heath, the single greatest instance of psycho-meteorology in Western literature.

8. The heat in Albert Camus’s “The Stranger.”

The heat was beginning to scorch my cheeks; beads of sweat were gathering in my eyebrows. It was just the same sort of heat as at my mother’s funeral, and I had the same disagreeable sensations—especially in my forehead, where all the veins seemed to be bursting through the skin. I couldn’t stand it any longer, and took another step forward. I knew it was a fool thing to do; I wouldn’t get out of the sun by moving on a yard or so. But I took that step, just one step, forward. And then the Arab drew his knife and held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight.

It is a hot day when Mersault, Camus’s disaffected, emotionally detached French-Algerian protagonist, learns that his mother has died; a hot day when she is buried; a hot day when he shoots a man five times and kills him; a hot day when the murder trial begins that will culminate in a death sentence. To the judge’s question about his motives, Mersault “tried to explain that it was because of the sun.” Camus isn’t engaging in the pathetic fallacy, Sweltering North Africa Edition; far from symbolizing intense passion or blazing anger, the heat is external and arbitrary—as good or bad an explanation as any other for the events in a putatively meaningless (if swelteringly heliocentric) universe.

9. The fraught weather forecast in Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

That hedged promise is the first line of Woolf’s novel: if the weather is fine the next day—not the likeliest of propositions in the Hebrides, where the story takes place—Mrs. Ramsay’s youngest child, six-year-old James, will get to visit a nearby lighthouse. For the space of a paragraph, James brims with joy. Then comes the cold water: “ ‘But,’ said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ‘it won’t be fine.’ ” Thus does Woolf use the weather, that most banal of topics, to establish the emotional economy of the Ramsay household. Mrs. Ramsay, tender toward all men, buoys up and protects her son; Mr. Ramsay, intolerant of illusion and impatient with innocence, ridicules his wife and ruptures the boy’s dreams. In response, James’s bliss seroconverts to rage. Will it be fine tomorrow? The question recurs throughout the first section of the book, and every time it is fraught—as quotidian exchanges so often are—with claims to knowledge, assertions of authority, bids for love.

10. The flood in William Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms.”

He continued to paddle though the skiff had ceased to move forward at all but seemed to be hanging in space while the paddle still reached thrust recovered and reached again; now instead of space the skiff became abruptly surrounded by a welter of fleeing debris—planks, small buildings, the bodies of drowned yet antic animals, entire trees leaping and diving like porpoises above which the skiff seemed to hover in weightless and airy indecision like a bird above a fleeing countryside, undecided where to light or whether to light at all, while the convict squatted in it still going through the motions of paddling, waiting for an opportunity to scream.

Faulkner liked a good flood. In “As I Lay Dying,” a mule team is drowned, a man’s leg is broken, and the coffin containing the body of Addie Bundren is very nearly swept away after her family, trying to transport her for burial, attempts to ford a river swollen by flood. But the truly determinative deluge in Faulkner’s fiction is the one in “Old Man,” one of two intertwined stories that together form the novel “The Wild Palms.” When the Mississippi River floods, the convicts in a penal colony along its banks are put to work stemming the disaster. One of them, presumed missing in an overturned skiff, survives the floodwaters and rescues a pregnant woman, before eventually surrendering to the local sheriff. The implication is unfortunate—freedom, here, is worse than prison, not least because it involves keeping company with women—but the flood is magnificent. At one point, the convict, like a dead man in purgatory, “still going through the motions of paddling though he no longer even had the paddle now, looked down upon a world turned to furious motion and in incredible retrograde.”