There is a hole in the heart of Madeleine Watts’ melancholic second novel Elegy, Southwest. “A really big, and expensive, hole,” says Lewis, one half of the married couple whose desert road trip forms the novel’s narrative arc. The hole, a land artwork in progress, is titled “Negative Capability” after “a quality that Keats believed the best artists possessed: the ability to stay open to doubt and uncertainty”. It’s a quality Watts has in spades.
“My general personality is to go up close to the thing that makes me sad or frightened. I go up close and tinker around and it feels like I gain a modicum of control. It doesn’t necessarily feel cathartic but I’ve done something,” the Australian author says.
In Elegy, Southwest, the frightening and sad things include the death of a parent and a miscarriage, as well as disappearances: water, animals, people, love. It’s a novel of apocalypses, imminent and historical, paused beside and sped past as the couple attempt to follow the elusive, overused Colorado River.
“I was so obsessed with this river that’s so managed and contained, and allows this part of the world to exist but because of hubris and climate change, is threatened,” says Watts. “Theoretically you should be able to follow the river all the way down but you can’t. It doesn’t meet the sea. It hasn’t for years.”
Watts lent her obsession to the novel’s protagonist, Eloise, who researches her dissertation about the river while grieving multiple losses – past, present and future. Like Watts, Eloise is an Australian who moved to New York and experienced the same uncanny sense of being “home and yet not at home” that Watts encountered when treading on gumnuts in California.
The genesis of the novel lies in two road trips Watts took through the American south-west. The author felt drawn to the “pernicious mythology” of the road and the west: “It’s the America you are singing about in all the songs. I was interested in exploring this Americana from an outsider perspective,” she says.
Unsure what to make of the extensive notes from these trips, Watts sat on them through two crises: the 2019-20 bushfire season – during which she experienced the frightening silence of the burned bush while visiting her mother in Sydney’s Blue Mountains – and the Covid pandemic. Trapped during lockdowns in various locations that were neither Sydney nor her adopted home of New York, Watts felt “physically stuck in places that were not where I was imaginatively”. She used Google maps to shape her notes into one fictional road trip taken during the 2018 California wildfires.
Somewhere between LA and Phoenix, Eloise begins to suspect she’s pregnant. Watts drafted what she refers to in Delilloesque terms as the novel’s “reproductive event” at the time Roe v Wade was overturned. She remembers riding the New York subway on the morning after the ruling. “It was boiling hot, everyone was dripping and I saw so many women on the verge of tears or actually crying. There was no sense of community. Everybody was really afraid and everybody was mourning and everybody was on their own,” she says. “My experience of reproductive events is that it’s the most private thing you can experience.”
As a woman in her 30s, Watts feels she’s now at a flashpoint. “I am a millennial thinking about reproduction and climate change,” she says. “Thinking about having kids is a gesture toward hope in the future. You are invested in the world still being there.”
Elegy, Southwest is Watts’ second work of climate fiction after her 2020 debut, The Inland Sea. At the time, she didn’t think of that first book in those terms – “it was billed as a ‘millennial novel’,” she says – but found herself often asked by interviewers to talk about writing into the climate crisis.
“I didn’t have good answers,” she says. “So as I was being asked those questions, I was basically forming ideas. In many ways this book is an answer to questions I was being asked about the first.”
Since then she’s taught courses on writing into nature and climate change at Columbia University, thinking through the implications of Mark Fisher and Daisy Hildyard’s theories for writers who want to respond to the crisis. Some of these ideas made it into the novel, as did “a sense of weariness, the feeling of being a bit tired of these things”.
Perhaps then, this is where genres meet. At the complicated intersections of wildfire and weariness, hope, thrill, heartbreak and Negative Capability, all millennial novels are climate novels, too. “I think that climate change should be in everyone’s writing right now,” says Watts. “It’s there. It has to be – and if it’s not, it’s being ignored.”
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts is out now through Ultimo Press ($34.99)
