Fiction

Melissa Broder, Death Valley (Scribner), 240pp. Hardback, $27.00.

At a low point in Melissa Broder’s new novel, Death Valley, the unnamed middle-aged narrator shits herself in the California desert:

From my guts: an ominous gurgling. I get into a squat (bad ankle raised up like a stork) and pull down my shorts, but not in time for (plot point) a diarrhea monsoon. There’s the thunderclap, the scorching rain, the dark puddle in the dark.

Broder’s “diarrhea monsoon” might find company within the scatological turn that literary fiction has recently taken—perhaps most notably in works such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021), works that do not shy away from what most would consider the gross and disgusting elements and processes of the human body.

Broder has developed a new, idiosyncratic, parenthetical delivery.

Broder’s narrator is nothing if not embodied. A 41-year-old writer, she pulls into a Best Western in a small fictional desert town resembling the real-life Baker, California (“just north of the Mojave Preserve and south of Death Valley”). She’s there to write her next novel (her third—just as Death Valley is Broder’s third), but she’s also escaping her severely ill father in the hospital and her chronically ill (and flatulent) husband at home. She seems potentially interested in a sexual affair and gets turned on by the motel clerks—fantasizing about the “wonderful cleavage” of one and imagining the erect penis of another: “Wonder if it would be weird if I went up to him and said, Hey, I’d love to just lay around with your dick in my mouth (it would be weird).”

Clearly, she needs to work through some shit.

While hiking along a nearby desert trail to straighten herself out, she comes across a giant saguaro cactus (“a colossal vegetal tower”), a species she has been told cannot be found in the region. She spies a slit in the side of this hallucinatory succulent, fingers it in an oddly erotic way, and gradually enlarges the hole until she can crawl inside. (In a review, Claire Vaye Watkins describes this as “riotously original ecosexual surrealism.”) There, in her own strange field of dreams, she meets an incarnation of her (still-living) father as a healthy child.

It’s hard not to see a link between the narrator and Broder herself, also a writer in her early forties. (Broder has explicitly drawn some connections in an interview.) The narrator, for example, casually mentions her issues with sobriety, a subject Broder wrote about in So Sad Today, her 2016 collection of personal essays (where she also wrote about her physical attraction to both men and women). Broder has claimed that she once fancied herself “a kind of Jack Kerouac/Hunter S. Thompson/other widely fetishized dude-figure.” Perhaps that’s why the narrator of Death Valley begins somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert.

The danger of such an approach is that the problematic self becomes the pure focus—just one character talking all the time about herself. As the “diarrhea monsoon” might suggest, Death Valley descends into a narcissistic nightmare, with the narrator alone in the desert concentrating on her shit and laying it all bare on the page. (Look! Look at what’s wrong with me!) She senses such trouble at the outset, introducing herself to her readers as “the kind of person who makes another person’s coma all about me.”

Luckily, Broder’s style keeps it interesting through much of the narrative. The 59 chapters in this novel are each very short—on average, about three pages apiece. And the narrator speaks in the present tense, maintaining a baseline intensity that keeps things moving through the book’s sparsely populated setting.

Most notably, Broder has developed a new, idiosyncratic parenthetical delivery—a delivery absent from her last novel, Milk Fed (2021), which was about a voracious young woman with an eating disorder. (If her last novel was about appetite, her new novel is about abstinence. Death Valley’s narrator has little opportunity to indulge in anything.) Broder’s use of parentheses might be seen in the “diarrhea monsoon” quotation above. It’s also on display in the following passage:

When interviewed about my “writing process,” I always say that I don’t believe a person has to suffer to make art. But that’s only because I imagine it’s true for others (also, I don’t want to be accused of inspiring teen suicide). If ever I attempt to make the inside of my skull a softer place to live (i.e., by saying kind and gentle words to myself), a counter-alert pops up inside my head that says, This is dangerous. Do not tread here. Also, you’re wrong.

The parentheticals act as asides to her readers, but because the novel is already in a soliloquizing mode, they are, in effect, double-asides, or meta-asides. The narrator provides her own running commentary—correcting, troubling, qualifying, and contradicting the thoughts and counter-thoughts that she is relating to us anyway. This style is highly appropriate for a self-obsessed character, and its feints and pivots maintain a lively and entertaining tone throughout the novel. Where the plot falters, the voice still commands attention. Broder has achieved something here that may serve her well in future works.

This narrative polyphony partly makes up for the fact that hardly any other characters speak in the novel—which is a shame because when they do, they’re often funny. Best Western employee Jethra, for example, describes a Bulgarian funeral: “Very different from American funeral. People are screaming, throwing dirt. People are trying to climb into the coffin!” Is that good? “Yes, I recommend.”

What is this narrator doing in the desert? She’s walking through the valley of the shadow of death. She’s also finding herself. (It’s a spiritual journey.) But her best chance at success is to avoid doing it alone.