Fiction

Madeleine Watts, Elegy, Southwest (Simon & Schuster), 288 pp. Hardback, $27.99.

In the middle of Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts’s new novel, Eloise, the 29-year-old narrator, and her husband, Lewis, sit in a diner in Sedona and chat with an elderly man named Kenneth. Kenneth’s recently deceased partner was a notable land artist, Lawrence Greco, and Lewis works for an art foundation that was supporting his work. Lewis is meeting with Kenneth to check on the status of Negative Capability, the multiyear masterpiece project Greco was digging in the Arizona desert when he died of cancer. It is designed to be “a mathematically perfect spherical hollow in the earth, intersected with tunnels, mazes, and mirrors.” (It sounds a bit like James Turrell’s Roden Crater.)

The bereaved Kenneth, who had promised to complete the work, explains that Lawrence’s body has been cryogenically frozen. He found an organization in Scottsdale that “would keep you until science had caught up and figured out how to sustain life beyond the poor stopwatches of our natural lifespans.” Kenneth realizes this might sound crazy, “but it’s got to be worth a shot.” As he reasons, “They might be able to do something with electronics one day, you know. To upload our minds to the internet, the way they do with the cloud.” The hope here is less about immortality than about reuniting with his lover: “We won’t lose each other. We’ll see each other on the other side, even if we look like something none of us here can even imagine.”

The novel captures a desert spirit that often proves elusive to writers.

Eloise listens patiently. She is here because she wants to write a doctoral dissertation on the Colorado River. Born and raised in Australia (an origin apparent through her insistence on referring to parking lots as “car parks”), she and Lewis met in New York, where she is a graduate student. The American Southwest fascinates her, and Kenneth’s spiel about cryogenics encapsulates, for her, the entire ethos of Arizona:

As Kenneth spoke, I couldn’t help but remember things I’d read in books about the history of the American frontier and the history of the Colorado [River], of which this place, this state, was its apotheosis. Belief in technological ingenuity having the capacity to break new ground, a refusal of endings or of boundaries or of volume. And all playing out across this land bearing the scars of so much violence and wanton destruction. I did not think I had ever in my life as an immigrant in this country heard something that sounded so decadently American as what Kenneth had just told us. So fearsome and optimistic.

Lewis, it turns out, grew up in Phoenix, though he doesn’t miss it. The novel recalls a road trip that he and Eloise take in 2018, beginning in Las Vegas (at Atomic Liquors, with Eloise spying some “inexpertly parked cars” in the “cavernously empty parking lot across the street”) and meandering through the Southwest: San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Sedona, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon. As the narrator, Eloise is writing in the second person from a vantage point several years ahead; something has happened to Lewis, and she offers this narrative as a kind of love letter, or elegy, for their relationship. The novel thus plays with time—while set during a trip at the end of 2018, it makes repeated proleptic gestures to a shadowy future (finally revealed at the end of the book).

At the heart of Elegy, Southwest is this comparison between region and relationship. Eloise and Lewis bum around the desert, passing through motels and diners, trying to ignore the fact that their marriage—like the multiplying suburban landscapes—may be unsustainable. Lewis is a rather weepy husband struggling with depression; he hasn’t been quite able to recover from the death of his mother the year before. He doesn’t have a lot to say, and only cannabis seems to improve his mood. Eloise, for her part, might be pregnant; she missed her last period. She doesn’t mention this to Lewis, though, and she continues to drink, sometimes heavily, under the assumption that nothing has changed.

The novel is most winning as a book about the Southwest. Eloise is no snooty East Coast critic. While she is well aware of water issues (Watts notes that Cadillac Desert was a foundational text for her work), she is continually impressed by the “fearsome and optimistic” outlook that drives development in the region. “I loved it for its beauty and its strangeness and its perseverance despite the sheer impossibility of its continued existence,” she writes of Arizona. And she has a knack for describing the sweetness of a date shake or the intensity of “a glaring blue sky, where clouds smeared the firmament like toothpaste spat into a sink.”

If anything, Eloise is drawn to the Southwest not because of her husband’s childhood but because of her fascination with catastrophe. Near the end of the novel, she and Lewis sit down in the evening at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. “The longer I sat, the more I was able to imagine myself as the very last person left at the end of all things, alone there with you in the wake of a future calamity.” The calamity, of course, has transpired; Eloise is an elegist, not a prophet. She is prepared for mourning.

Watts’s novel is a very engaging read. Eloise is a sensible narrator who withholds just enough to keep her odd journey compelling. And Elegy, Southwest isn’t nearly as sad as its title might imply. It captures a desert spirit that often proves elusive to writers.