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The second novel by the Australian writer Madeleine Watts, Elegy, Southwest, is astonishingly and chillingly prescient. A married couple in their twenties embark on a road trip beginning in Las Vegas and ending at the Grand Canyon. During intermittent spells of reception, news trickles in of wildfires across northern California and Los Angeles. Firefighters subsist on “one-hour naps”. The smoke lends sunsets an ominous hue. But Watts’ foresight extends beyond impending climate catastrophe: standing outside the filmmaker David Lynch’s LA home and hearing coughing, the protagonists Eloise and Lewis wonder: “Does he have a cold?”
These unsettling parallels with the current news cycle are doubly effective in a novel concerned with the warning signs of tragedy. As in Watts’ debut, The Inland Sea — which centred on a Sydney-based emergency services operator for whom those disasters seeped into her own existence — personal catastrophes run in tandem with broader scale calamities. Amid severe water shortages and dire treatment of undocumented migrants and the incarcerated, Watts captures a general state of imperilment.
By narrating Elegy, Southwest in the second person, Watts imbues her writing with a mournfulness from the outset. The voice of Eloise, a student researcher on transfer to the US, addresses the “you” of her husband, who works for “the Foundation”, an art conglomerate funding installations out in the desert. For Eloise’s dissertation on the Colorado River and water scarcity, the pair rent a car and set out to circumnavigate its expanse — their only required stop-off a foundation project for which the partner of a deceased artist is digging an immense cavern in the sand, adorned with mirrors, providing visitors “a unique experience of celestial time”.
Elegy, Southwest is a study of grieving — for what has passed already but also what one stands to lose. Through Eloise’s voice, speaking in the past tense, we catch glimpses into an ominous future. (On the topic of marriage, she fleetingly says: “People still were, then.”) There is a touch of the confessional to Eloise’s account. Gradually, it is revealed that the trip takes place one year after the death of Lewis’s mother — “the worst thing that had ever happened to you, and us”. Lewis is still reeling, vaping weed until unconscious and becoming increasingly drawn to dubious New Age methods of purging his pain.
While wending through America’s peculiar, apocalyptic landscapes, Eloise delicately weaves in different sources on bereavement, the desert and the dwindling Colorado River, from Elizabeth Bishop to Georgia O’Keeffe. Beneath the density of her research, there is a sense of insufficiency, “the utter poverty of language in the face of calamity”. Most interestingly, Watts suggests love itself is a form of sorrow, a “desire for so much else — rivers, pleasure boats, fish, the salt water of childhood”. Like the natural landscape, Watts implies, love is precious and precarious.
For all its melancholy, Watts’ sophomore novel is shrewdly funny, its humour mostly flowing from its voyage into the weirdness of Americana. Detours and diversions include “date shakes”, co-working spaces “where llamas roamed free, and sometimes spat at you” and the environmental activist and singer Katie Lee wandering naked through the Colorado River. Each phase of the journey is prefaced by a prose poem plotting its coordinates: “Endangered Desert Tortoise”; “Roland Barthes Crying in the Boulangerie”; “An Abortive Lunch”. This is all underpinned by eerie echoes: A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack playing on a loop, every dog they meet being named Max.
Watts covers a vast amount of territory, from allusions to Trump to meditations on colonialism. Like Megan Hunter, she anchors a story of climate crisis in the profoundly human, her style characterised by a grace and effortlessness. If there is a little of Rachel Cusk in her way of dancing through characters and ideas, Watts’ voice feels more impassioned. This is a rare kind of writing where every page offers something to linger on, beautiful and devastating in equal measure.
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts Pushkin Press £18.99/Simon & Schuster $27.99, 288 pages
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