I spotted Madeleine Watts’s Elegy, Southwest on social media thanks to a passionately enthusiastic post from its editor. The premise of a road novel set in the desert of the American Southwest, a landscape which I’ve visited several times and loved, made me put up my hand immediately. Watts’s novel follows Eloise and Lewis over the two weeks they spend tracing the course of the Colorado River, central to Eloise’s dissertation.
Back on the road the desert seemed obliterated by the bright green, perfectly square fields of alfalfa, lettuce, and sugar beet, all growing on irrigated water.
Eloise and Lewis have been together for five years or so. He seemed to be looking for commitment from the start, mentioning marriage before love. The death of his mother in the spring has hit him hard. Eloise is worried about his self-medicating, hoping that the trip might help. She’s in charge of their route which begins in Las Vegas, taking them through Nevada, into Arizona and Lewis’s hometown of Phoenix for Thanksgiving with his family, then on to Utah. As they travel through the dramatic landscape, Eloise contemplates the mighty Colorado reduced to a trickle by a drought which took hold several years ago, its water used to power thirsty cities where sprinklers play on lawns, farmers grow water-hungry vegetables and anyone with money has a swimming pool. Throughout their journey, awareness of the seemingly unstoppable wildfires is a constant, cinders falling like snow and spectacular sunsets made more so by smoke. As the two weeks wear on, it becomes clear that Lewis is in trouble leaving Eloise at a loss to know what to do.
The creosote and the live oak had made way for pinyon pines and juniper. Black maples planted along the highway were flushed in the red and orange of autumn leaves.
Rather like an eighteenth-century picaresque, each of the novel’s chapters is prefaced by a summary of its contents as Eloise looks back at this southwestern odyssey taken a few years ago. Watts’s evocative cinematic descriptions of the desert landscape offer a vivid backdrop threaded through a narrative in which climate change is a constant background hum together with the human intervention which may have seemed inventive when first enacted, but which has proved disastrous. At the forefront of this thoughtful, poignant novel, is a powerful grief which threatens to overwhelm both Lewis and his relationship with Eloise, their uncertain future resolved by Watts in her final chapter. There’s a bibliography of sources drawn on for the historical detail woven through Watts’s narrative which, in clumsier hands, might have turned into a litany of damage done but instead she’s written an engrossing and engaging love story for both Eloise and Lewis and for the planet, each reflecting the other.
Pushkin Press London 9781805337621 288 pages Hardback
