Elegy, Southwest

November 25, 2024
In the pensive latest from Watts (after The Inland Sea), an Australian woman named Eloise reflects on a road trip she took several years earlier with her American husband, Lewis. The melancholic second-person narration, addressed to Lewis, hints at some kind of loss, as Eloise recounts their journey across the American Southwest in 2018. Both are in their late 20s when they fly from New York City to Las Vegas, then visit the Hoover Dam as part of Eloise’s research for her doctoral thesis on climate change. In Phoenix, they celebrate Thanksgiving with Lewis’s family, whom they last visited for his mother’s funeral several months earlier. During a stop at Salvation Mountain, Calif., Eloise wonders if she’s pregnant, and the unsettled question adds tension to the narrative, as does her difficulty in connecting with Lewis, who deals with his grief by posting cheesy tourist photos on Instagram. A sense of foreboding grows as they drive into the Arizona mountains to meet with the widower of a land artist, whose work is supported by Lewis’s foundation. With each chapter, Eloise tries to wring deeper meaning from her memories of the trip: “A desert was a kind of objective correlative, an easy metaphor for the struggle of the soul.” Bursting with ideas and emotion, this is an accomplished tale of self-examination. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (Feb.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the location where the character Eloise wonders if she is pregnant.

January 1, 2025

Ecological grief is often categorized as a form of ambiguous loss, because the feelings and memories of the environment are partly lost and partly not. Moreover, the magnitude of future loss is unknown. In her latest novel, Watts (The Inland Sea) sets a futile exploration for water in the deserts of Australia alongside her narrator's self-destructive search for meaning in a sea of anxiety. Set in 2018, the narrative follows Eloise and Lewis, who are road-tripping through the southwestern part of the United States. Lewis is grieving the loss of his mother and tracking down a wayward work of land art, while Eloise is doing research for her dissertation on the historical depletion and control of the Colorado River. The novel employs both retrospective and real-time narration to underscore each character's feelings of dispossession from the land, their own bodies, and love. Thematically, the book also addresses control of women's bodies in parallel to the environment. VERDICT Metaphors abound in Watts's fiction, but this work solemnly ponders whether accepting negation opens up alternative paths toward the future. Her novel movingly covers multitudinous forms of grief: ecological, political, and familial.--Joshua Finnell

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February 1, 2025
A young couple drives across the desert of the American Southwest in 2018. Wildfires are decimating communities in every direction, the intensity of the desert's danger alive at every mile. Eloise, an academic, writes in second person to her artist husband Lewis. When the couple first fell in love, Lewis' worst nightmare was losing his parents. After that nightmare becomes a reality, the couple is derailed. Any reader familiar with grief will connect with the blindness and helplessness of Eloise and Lewis' sorrow. The novel unfolds in cinematic snapshots as the couple grapples with life's devastating changes. The personal drama in Watts' (The Inland Sea, 2021) second novel is inseparable from the environmental; this is love at the end of the world. Watts effectively contrasts the gorgeous flora and fauna of the American Southwest with the region's unique, characteristic precariousness. Recalling the sunny haze of Joan Didion's work, the duality of life is everywhere: joy and pain, pregnancy and death, art and science. Literary fiction ready for a changing world.

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February 15, 2025
A married couple has life-changing realizations during a road trip across the American Southwest. Watts' elegant sophomore novel follows Lewis, who's from Arizona, and Australian Eloise--a married couple living in New York City--on a convoluted road trip through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah. The main purpose of the trip is to allow Eloise to study the Colorado River for her dissertation and give Lewis, who works for a foundation dedicated to land art, an opportunity to check on a project they'd been supporting. Quietly, Eloise also hopes their adventure will help her husband move through the grief of his mother's death, which has been consuming their lives as he seeks out increasingly unorthodox ways to heal. While traveling across the barren landscape, Eloise begins to wonder if she's pregnant. She struggles with whether to tell Lewis--who has never felt further away, despite their physical proximity--or if she should give in to her instinct to "continue to suspend [herself] in the amber of waiting." The trip serves as the novel's throughline while Eloise, the narrator, surfaces past memories and alludes to a very different present. The book is written in the second person as Eloise addresses Lewis, discussing their complicated marriage, love, art, death, climate change, wildfires, and America's strange, dangerous, and expansive beauty, to name a few. Watts writes beautifully about grief, loneliness, and memory. One particularly poignant moment happens when Eloise realizes their future child will know their grandmother only through stories. She describes this as "an odd sort of mourning--grieving a future I didn't know I'd even been so certain of." This sorrowful knowing permeates the whole novel, which is less concerned with plot than with cataloging the couple's relationship. Whether in love or nature, Watts' prose artfully renders the mundane and majestic in equal measure. A quiet and sweeping portrait of a marriage teetering on the edge.

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