The term “elegy” implies the lyrical. Both by its title and its narrative mode – a first-person narrator addressing a loved one – one might expect poeticism from Madeleine Watts’s sophomore novel, Elegy, Southwest. But its narrator Eloise’s account of a road trip through the American southwest, taken with her now-missing husband Lewis, is stripped of lyrical qualities, at times feeling merely transcribed. Watts’s prose is remarkably unromantic, almost soupy in its accounting of mundane details, conveyed in sentences of monotonous grammar.
Perhaps lyric is superfluous in times of profound environmental emergency and collapse. Set against the backdrop of western wildfires, the novel is concerned with themes of loss and grief, both personal and environmental. Though Eloise’s “terror of the tap running dry” (a terror inherited from Didion) is certainly expressed as she and Lewis move through the desert landscape, the prose simply lacks the power to induce such terror in the reader themselves.
Pulling the couple through the landscape is Eloise’s fascination with the Colorado river, contemporaneously in threat of disappearing. Watts’s own literary interest in “climate-change novels” is evident in a brilliant piece of criticism on Playground by Richard Powers, penned for The Baffler in October 2024. Of Playground, Watts laments, “the story is lost inside the plot ... the seams of the novel are always visible.”
It’s a shame that something similar can be said of Elegy, Southwest, a novel whose story is lost, not exactly in plot, but instead in a range of references that fail to fold satisfactorily into a compelling fictional infrastructure; a 10-page note on the novel’s “sources” is collated at the end of the book.
Eloise is undertaking a dissertation, but a good novel is not a doctoral thesis. A good novel may cite and reference but its true source is the force of its author’s imagination – conveyed less in outright fabulation than in formal inventiveness and the quality of the writing.
Watts opts for emulation, modelling her novel’s structure on Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. But somehow it doesn’t quite work. At times it feels as if the novel were reverse-engineered as a container for an academic field trip. To such ends, dissertations typically suffice. Meanwhile, a sharper, tauter – and shorter – novel is hiding somewhere in Elegy, Southwest.
