Books
Madeleine Watts
Elegy, Southwest
In an early scene in Elegy, Southwest, the novel’s narrator, Eloise, watches a woman calling out for her lost dog, then being confronted by a “lump of fur in the gutter”. It is the moment just before knowing that a tragedy has happened, the “brief, quiet instant when you know the flood of pain is coming” that Eloise lingers on, that she can’t stop thinking about. Later, she refers to this kind of moment as “the caesura” – and it is this state of suspension, of waiting for whatever is sure to come, that is at the heart of the book.
Eloise, an Australian academic, is travelling through the south-west of America with husband, Lewis – a road trip partly motivated by Eloise’s research into the Colorado River, and partly undertaken for Lewis’s work with an art foundation primarily concerned with the construction and preservation of the large-scale land art prominent in these desert places. For Eloise, the landscapes they are passing through are saturated with a kind of anticipatory melancholy. They are carved out of the desert and floodplain by the creation of the Hoover Dam, dependent on poorly calculated allotments of its water that is almost certain, at some point in the future, to run dry. These places exist, that is, very much on the brink of collapse.
Eloise is also beginning to suspect she might be pregnant – her period is increasingly late – but she cannot bring herself to confirm this one way or another. She chooses instead to stay in her own state of unknowing for as long as possible, in no small part because she is aware that something is not quite right with Lewis, who is grieving his mother’s recent death and imperceptibly pulling away from Eloise and their shared world.
This uncertainty and suspension is complicated further by Eloise’s narration: she is recounting the trip from a point some months in the future, after something has happened to Lewis, and her grief suffuses everything that she relates. The sense that she is sifting through her memories for interactions and small incidents that she did not understand or to which she did not pay proper heed – for that which may have served as a warning or might yet offer clues – is palpable.
What is most impressive about the novel is Watts’s ability to hold Eloise’s very personal tragedy alongside the despair she carries in the face of the impending climate catastrophe, so obvious in the landscape she is travelling through but unfathomably far-reaching in its scale. Eloise and Lewis pass through towns where once-drowned buildings are re-emerging from drying lakes, where the water supply is not safe for drinking, where highway billboards proclaim, “Talk to your doctor about uranium, radiation and your health”. Across everything, smoke from wildfires burning in California muddies the air. Eloise can do nothing in the face of this catastrophe but pay attention and document what she learns and sees, just as she is powerless to help Lewis or even truly understand his state of mind.
This continual shifting in scale never feels over-determined or forced, in part because these all-but-ruined landscapes are not neutral ground for either character. Though they both live in New York, Lewis grew up in Arizona. It takes Eloise far too long to realise that her grim prognostications affect him differently because they are directed at the landscapes of his childhood, of his origin and home.
For her part, Eloise is struck frequently by a sense of the uncanny whenever she encounters outcrops of Australian plants – eucalypts, wattles and pittosporum – planted across this unfamiliar desert and its cities. Her unsettling sense of the familiar within this alien environment is part of what draws her to it and brings her anxieties about catastrophic change to the forefront of her mind.
Watts’s writing of these landscapes is one of the real pleasures of the book. Her descriptions are lyrical and always underpinned by a keen eye for the incongruous and absurd. They are also intensely researched – Eloise’s interactions with the places that she passes through draw on historical sources and literary anecdotes, as well as interpretations from visual art and cinema, and together build a rich and nuanced understanding of both their physicality and the meanings that have been made from them. Of everything, that is, that stands to be lost or drastically changed, all that is at stake, and of the human interventions that have brought about this state.
There is great tenderness in Watts’s portrayal of Lewis and Eloise’s relationship. Despite all that they cannot say to each other or do for each other, their small gestures of kindness, humour and care are touchingly detailed, as is Eloise’s frequent marvelling at Lewis’s physical beauty and presence. This is thrown into ever-sharper relief as the shape of Eloise’s grief and the position from which she is remembering slowly become clear.
Elegy, Southwest is an accomplished novel, beautifully crafted and complex in its layerings and shifts in scale. It is an exploration of climate anxiety and grief that never offers easy answers or simple emotional responses but asks what it means to live in anticipation of disaster, in the caesura before it strikes, and how difficult a thing this is to grapple with, at any scale.
Ultimo Press, 288pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 22, 2025 as "Elegy, Southwest".
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