Offill doesn’t write about the climate crisis but from deep within it. She does not paint pictures of apocalyptic scenarios; she charts internal cartographies. We observe her characters’ lurching shame, despair, boredom and fatigue — solastalgia experienced in ordinary life, vying with the demands of aging parents, small children, the churn of the mind. What she is doing, her friend the novelist Adam Ross told me, is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself.

When Offill was a college student, she woke one night to find a man kneeling by the edge of her bed. The man was wearing work clothes, and in the first, hazy moments of waking, she assumed he must have been part of the construction crew working next door. He must need me, she thought. He must have a question. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the clock in the room. It was 3:04 a.m. The man put a finger to his lips.

She cried out. Her roommate heard her and called through the wall, sleepily. “There’s someone in the house,” Offill said. “He’s in my room.” She heard the thump of her roommate jumping out of bed. The man turned and walked out, leaving through the front door.

Offill told me this story over lunch in Korea­town in Manhattan in December, breaking off midsentence to look up at me, suddenly amused. She asked, as she often does in the course of her anecdotes that detour into digressions, comic impressions, trivia: “How did I get here?” You were talking about denial, I prompted her. Offill spent years researching disaster psychology for “Weather.” In emergencies, she told me, we rarely take immediate action. “We all just have this normalcy bias,” she said. “Your brain is like: I have not experienced this. I do not think I am experiencing this now. People spend a lot of time at their desks straightening things.” That’s why that night nags at her — it wasn’t just the horror of finding a strange man kneeling by her bed, but also that mysterious instinct to construct a story in which his presence made perfect sense.

What mechanisms — what sorts of evidence, what kinds of narratives — can jolt the brain out of its set patterns of denial, accommodation and adjustment? New forms must be forged; new traps set; new words invented, like “solastalgia,” that sidestep numbing jargon. Artists thinking seriously about depicting the climate crisis join a contentious conversation among scientists and activists who have long been struggling with the “narrative problem” of the climate emergency. How do we write a story with an antagonist when we are the antagonist? Do we have a responsibility to avoid narratives of blame and despair, lest they stoke our sense of hopelessness and passivity? Or is there a value, even a moral imperative, in presenting the threats, as frightening as they are?

In 2005, the naturalist Robert Macfarlane asked, in an influential essay in The Guardian: “Where is the literature of climate change? Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?” How should we understand the paucity of the cultural response to climate change, he asked, compared with the body of work cata­lyzed by the threat of nuclear war? In recent years, however, planetary collapse has emerged as a dominant concern in contemporary fiction; there have been major novels by Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Jeff VanderMeer, Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeanette Winterson. Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments,” which examines the connections between totalitarianism and despoliation, shared the Booker Prize last year. Richard Powers’s “The Overstory,” which follows a group of environmental activists, took the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.