Madeleine Watts’s first novel, 2020’s The Inland Sea, was an urban fever dream, an ambitious, sophisticated and slightly uneven creation. In it, intimations of climate breakdown, reflections on gendered violence and a rejection of the great Australian ugliness were grafted on to a narrative about a young woman adrift in the interregnum between the end of her university studies and a planned move abroad. Woven through it was a series of excerpts from the journals of the explorer John Oxley, detailing his search for Australia’s mythical inland sea.
Water – imagined and real – also plays a big part in Watts’s enormously impressive second novel, Elegy, Southwest. Set in 2018, as the Camp Fire swept through northern California – destroying communities in Paradise, Concow and elsewhere, and blanketing much of the state in thick smoke – it follows young narrator Eloise and her partner, Lewis, as they take a road trip through California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Eloise narrates these events from somewhere in the future, after an unnamed calamity has overtaken Lewis, leaving her raking over the events of those weeks for some clue to explain what happened.
The trip they take is partly about work: Lewis is employed by a Las Vegas-based foundation for conceptual land art, much of which is “built on a fantastical scale in remote corners of nearby deserts”. He has been tasked to check on the progress of a vast piece that is supposed to be being completed by the partner of a recently deceased artist. Meanwhile, Eloise is researching a dissertation which will give shape to her deep fascination with the Colorado River, “its imminent loss”, “the miracle of it, and the tragedy”.
The trip’s purpose is not merely practical. Eloise hopes it will also serve as a circuit-breaker, a way of escaping the occluding pall of grief and depression in which Lewis has been mired since the death of his mother 10 months earlier. She suspects she may be pregnant too, a possibility freighted with complication and uncertainty.
Against this backdrop the river, and water more generally, take on a powerful presence. Early in the novel Eloise cites Joan Didion’s celebration of dams in her 1979 essay Holy Water: the way her desire to see water under control grew out of a fear not just of its destructive potential, but also of its disappearance, “the terror of the tap running dry”. As in The Inland Sea, Watts recognises this desire for control as a kind of violence, the same gendered colonial impulse that fails to recognise the land for what it is, and instead dams and diverts rivers in order to “make them useful” for people to whom they never belonged.
The damming and destruction of the Colorado River offers a brutal lesson in the costs of this process, as does the Salton Sea – although Eloise and Lewis find beauty there, in its post-apocalyptic landscape of dead fish and skeletal birds. The combined effect of the ruination of the river, and the smoke from the fires, suffuse the novel with a millennial dread, its atmosphere full of portent as we witness the slow breakdown of Eloise and Lewis’ relationship – depicted with precision and intimacy, and blanketed by her sense of incomprehension and loss. At one point Eloise visits a therapist who tells her to forget about the stages of grieving – but “if there wasn’t a narrative container”, Eloise thinks, “there may not be an actual end to your grief”. At another, she finds herself confronted by “the utter poverty of language in the face of calamity”. Instead, the novel suggests, loss moves beneath everything, flowing and spreading like water within the earth.
This sense of life without resolution, of being suspended in-between, lends Elegy, Southwest real power. Watts captures something essential about the nature of grief as she blurs the boundaries between personal, bodily concerns and larger historical and environmental ones: just as Eloise’s pregnancy creates the potential for future loss, the fires burning in the background prefigure a future in which the only certainty is catastrophe.
Yet rather than give way to hopelessness, the novel suggests it is necessary to find a way to inhabit that space of unknowing. Or, as Eloise says at one point, “that in itself … was a choice: to continue to live suspended in the amber of waiting, the caesura between the intake of breath and whatever came next”.
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts is out now in the US via Simon & Schuster. It will be released in Australia on 1 March through Ultimo press, and in the UK on 13 March via ONE
