Elegy, Southwest

The narrator of Elegy, Southwest is Eloise, an Australian living and working in New York, who is telling the story to ‘you’, her husband. Her husband has recently lost his mother and has become overwhelmed and changed by the grief of this event in a way that is profound, unfolding, and unexpected. Narrator and husband are on a road trip together, taking in some places of his childhood, but also so that she can carry out research about the history of and prognosis for the Colorado River for her dissertation. Along the way, the landscape becomes a key character in the novel, a known and unknown background for the couple’s work and relationship, as they visit places of wild and excessive human intervention (Las Vegas, the Hoover Dam) and awesome natural spectacles (the Grand Canyon), and punctuate their epic travel with mundane searches for lunch and dinner and places to stay on the road. As the story progresses, the reader begins to understand that the narrator is telling the story to her husband’s absence. ‘You’ are not there, but where have ‘you’ gone? The book is an elegy of many kinds.

Watts has done a wonderful job here, melding the deep emotional terrains of personal grief with the enormity of climate grief in a genuinely moving story that is somehow both a classic American road trip novel and a very Australian book about living in the world right now. Concerns the characters (and we all) have for the Earth and how we live on it and with each other at this time co-exist in the novel with the very personal day-to-day experience of being in a relationship under pressure, in which love, in the end, just might not be enough. In both cases, Watts speaks to an overwhelming sense that we are witnessing the end of things, and teaches us to sit with the discomfort, distress, and ultimately the impossibility of trying to reconcile loss in whatever form it takes. Elegy, Southwest is sad and funny, grand and intimate, informed and inquisitive, and above all, a beautiful piece of writing.