Author Madeleine Watts’ latest novel, Elegy, Southwest, passes its first truth test on page one: “There’s something f*****-up about Vegas streets, you said.” So far so good! As the novel’s protagonists, married couple Eloise and Lewis, putter around town, Watts enshrouds their movements in a murmuration of smartly deployed Vegas deets and references: strategic name drops (Frenchman Mountain, Dave Hickey) and real places slyly depicted — for random example, the downtown watering hole ReBAR, which one hipster loves for “its embrace of capital and kitsch, the forthrightness of the grift.”
In most cases, of course, fictional fidelity to a novel’s real-life setting doesn’t matter much to anyone beyond local readers. But this is literary fiction — you can tell by the lack of quote marks in the dialogue — so it’s not going to rely on high-octane genre plot mechanics to carry the reader’s interest. Instead, the story needs a constantly refreshed, origami-precise presentation of character and place. Watts’ careful verisimilitude is an early signal that she’s done the necessary work.
Vegas is the jumping-off point for a road trip the couple is taking — Lewis, so he can visit Southwestern land art sites on behalf of the arts foundation he works for, Eloise so she can study the gasping Colorado River for her PhD thesis. Lewis is struggling with grief from his mother’s death, and his changing behavior is already forcing cracks in their marriage, which the road trip will sharply widen. Eloise thinks she might be pregnant, but hasn’t mentioned this to Lewis.
Their personal griefs and fractures are mirrored by larger ones of climate change and social discord. Elegy, Southwest is set in 2018, a horrifying fire year in California, and thus the couple’s trip carries them deep into the planetary gestalt of loss and anxiety — as another recent book, Kyle Paoletta’s nonfiction American Oasis, points out, the Southwest’s arid present is everyone else’s near future.
Lest this all sound too didactic, let me add that Watts is too good a writer, and too invested in her characters, to turn Elegy, Southwest into a mere slab of cli-fi alarmism. It’s a very good book about people and how they bear up, or sometimes don’t, under the pressures of modern life.
Elegy, Southwest
Madeleine Watts
288 pages, $27.99
Simon & Schuster