FICTION
Elegy, Southwest
Madeleine Watts
Ultimo, $34.99
Elegy, Southwest by Australian writer Madeleine Watts is framed by a road trip across the American southwest taken by Eloise and her husband, Lewis. Our unhappy couple embark on a field trip for Eloise’s PhD, which started as an investigation of bodies of water and has since narrowed down to the decline of the Colorado River. Lewis has become morose and withdrawn after the death of his mother. Haunted by a grief he is unwilling to share, he seeks the comforting oblivion of weed and silence.
Their journey soon adopts a cosmic dimension, so easily at hand for Anthropocene fiction. Eloise remarks that their tour of the river is a type of pilgrimage surveying “imminent loss”; here, again, the mundane exists in the shadow of ecological catastrophe.
The road trip is a classic vehicle to externalise an inner dissatisfaction, and one that has particular resonance in the American cultural imagination. Think of Kerouac’s bohemian bender, or Raoul Duke’s panicked fear and loathing in Las Vegas. For Eloise, the highway is “a means of escape”. But what she seeks escape from is in the car with her, often at the wheel.
In her debut novel The Inland Sea, Watts portrayed a Sydneysider in her 20s living under the tyranny of a bushfire-ravaged summer and dreaming of America. Elegy, Southwest follows a different protagonist, an Australian living in America. But the dream of The Inland Sea has manifested, maybe in another fictional life, gesturing towards some thematic continuity between the two works.
Much like The Inland Sea, this narrative’s frame functions as a loose catch-all for essayistic digressions into the histories of the Hoover Dam, irrigation and other terraforming projects, conceptual art, academic inquiry, and the books the characters are reading. The novel is accompanied by a “note on sources” that lays bare the intertexts, encouraging the reader to see this work as a fictional representation of real and pressing concerns about environmental decline.
Author Madeleine Watts.
The engine room of the drama is an unspoken, subterranean fallout between lovers. It is written from the perspective of Eloise addressing “you”, soon identified as Lewis, who has, since the events of the novel, gone missing. In many ways, Eloise’s retrospective is an endeavour to trace and comprehend the imperceptible dissolutions of a marriage breakdown.
This idea – gradual breakdown – applies as a dual experience of loss: we witness the disintegration of a marriage and the decline of the natural world. Writers of the Anthropocene frequently slide into the melodrama of climactic cataclysm. In trying to comprehend these immense planetary changes, language at some point pushes itself to the limits and exhausts the possibilities of capturing an emotional state composed by urgency and apathy, despair and hope, the individual and the collective. Eloise succumbs to this terrifying ineffability, to the “utter poverty of language in the face of calamity”.
