Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts review - powerful, poignant and suffused with millennial dread

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/18/elegy-southwest-book-review-madeleine-watts

Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts review – powerful, poignant and suffused with millennial dread

A young couple encounter catastrophic fires and ruined rivers on a California road trip, searching for art and hope in a darkening world

James Bradley
Mon 17 Feb 2025 09.00 EST

…

Water – imagined and real – also plays a big part in Watts’ enormously impressive second novel, Elegy, Southwest. Set in 2018, as the Camp Fire swept through northern California – destroying communities in Paradise, Concow and elsewhere, and blanketing much of the state in thick smoke – it follows young narrator Eloise and her partner, Lewis, as they take a road trip through California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Eloise narrates these events from somewhere in the future, after an unnamed calamity has overtaken Lewis, leaving her raking over the events of those weeks for some clue to explain what happened.

The trip they take is partly about work: Lewis is employed by a Las Vegas-based foundation for conceptual land art, much of which is “built on a fantastical scale in remote corners of nearby deserts”. He has been tasked to check on the progress of a vast piece that is supposed to be being completed by the partner of a recently deceased artist. Meanwhile, Eloise is researching a dissertation which will give shape to her deep fascination with the Colorado River, “its imminent loss”, “the miracle of it, and the tragedy”.

…

Against this backdrop the river, and water more generally, take on a powerful presence. Early in the novel Eloise cites Joan Didion’s celebration of dams in her 1979 essay Holy Water: the way her desire to see water under control grew out of a fear not just of its destructive potential, but also of its disappearance, “the terror of the tap running dry”. As in The Inland Sea, Watts recognises this desire for control as a kind of violence, the same gendered colonial impulse that fails to recognise the land for what it is, and instead dams and diverts rivers in order to “make them useful” for people to whom they never belonged.

The damming and destruction of the Colorado River offers a brutal lesson in the costs of this process, as does the Salton Sea – although Eloise and Lewis find beauty there, in its post-apocalyptic landscape of dead fish and skeletal birds. The combined effect of the ruination of the river, and the smoke from the fires, suffuse the novel with a millennial dread, its atmosphere full of portent as we witness the slow breakdown of Eloise and Lewis’ relationship – depicted with precision and intimacy, and blanketed by her sense of incomprehension and loss. At one point Eloise visits a therapist who tells her to forget about the stages of grieving – but “if there wasn’t a narrative container”, Eloise thinks, “there may not be an actual end to your grief”. At another, she finds herself confronted by “the utter poverty of language in the face of calamity”. Instead, the novel suggests, loss moves beneath everything, flowing and spreading like water within the Earth.

… more …

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