Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts evaluation – highly effective, poignant and suffused with millennial dread

Madeleine Watts’ first novel, 2020’s The Inland Sea, was an city fever dream, an formidable, subtle and barely uneven creation. In it, intimations of local weather breakdown, reflections on gendered violence and a rejection of the nice Australian ugliness have been grafted on to a story a couple of younger girl adrift within the interregnum between the tip of her college research and a deliberate transfer overseas. Woven via it was a collection of excerpts from the journals of the explorer John Oxley, detailing his seek for Australia’s legendary inland sea.

Water – imagined and actual – additionally performs an enormous half in Watts’ enormously spectacular second novel, Elegy, Southwest. Set in 2018, because the Camp Fireplace swept via northern California – destroying communities in Paradise, Concow and elsewhere, and blanketing a lot of the state in thick smoke – it follows younger narrator Eloise and her associate, Lewis, as they take a highway journey via California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Eloise narrates these occasions from someplace sooner or later, after an unnamed calamity has overtaken Lewis, leaving her raking over the occasions of these weeks for some clue to elucidate what occurred.

The journey they take is partly about work: Lewis is employed by a Las Vegas-based basis for conceptual land artwork, a lot of which is “constructed on a fantastical scale in distant corners of close by deserts”. He has been tasked to test on the progress of an unlimited piece that’s imagined to be being accomplished by the associate of a just lately deceased artist. In the meantime, Eloise is researching a dissertation which is able to give form to her deep fascination with the Colorado River, “its imminent loss”, “the miracle of it, and the tragedy”.

The journey’s goal just isn’t merely sensible. Eloise hopes it should additionally function a circuit-breaker, a method of escaping the occluding pall of grief and despair by which Lewis has been mired for the reason that demise of his mom 10 months earlier. She suspects she could also be pregnant too, a risk freighted with complication and uncertainty.

Towards this backdrop the river, and water extra usually, tackle a strong presence. Early within the novel Eloise cites Joan Didion’s celebration of dams in her 1979 essay Holy Water: the way in which her want to see water below management grew out of a concern not simply of its damaging potential, but in addition of its disappearance, “the fear of the faucet operating dry”. As in The Inland Sea, Watts recognises this want for management as a form of violence, the identical gendered colonial impulse that fails to recognise the land for what it’s, and as an alternative dams and diverts rivers in an effort to “make them helpful” for individuals to whom they by no means belonged.

The damming and destruction of the Colorado River presents a brutal lesson within the prices of this course of, as does the Salton Sea – though Eloise and Lewis discover magnificence there, in its post-apocalyptic panorama of lifeless fish and skeletal birds. The mixed impact of the ruination of the river, and the smoke from the fires, suffuse the novel with a millennial dread, its environment stuffed with portent as we witness the gradual breakdown of Eloise and Lewis’ relationship – depicted with precision and intimacy, and blanketed by her sense of incomprehension and loss. At one level Eloise visits a therapist who tells her to neglect concerning the levels of grieving – however “if there wasn’t a story container”, Eloise thinks, “there will not be an precise finish to your grief”. At one other, she finds herself confronted by “the utter poverty of language within the face of calamity”. As an alternative, the novel suggests, loss strikes beneath the whole lot, flowing and spreading like water throughout the Earth.

This sense of life with out decision, of being suspended in-between, lends Elegy, Southwest actual energy. Watts captures one thing important concerning the nature of grief as she blurs the boundaries between private, bodily considerations and bigger historic and environmental ones: simply as Eloise’s being pregnant creates the potential for future loss, the fires burning within the background prefigure a future by which the one certainty is disaster.

But slightly than give option to hopelessness, the novel suggests it’s essential to discover a option to inhabit that area of unknowing. Or, as Eloise says at one level, “that in itself … was a selection: to proceed to reside suspended within the amber of ready, the caesura between the consumption of breath and no matter got here subsequent”.

• Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts is out now within the US through Simon & Schuster. It is going to be launched in Australia on 1 March via Ultimo press, and within the UK on 13 March through ONE