By Jessie Tu
FICTION
Death Valley
Melissa Broder
Bloomsbury, $32.99
The great love stories involve characters traversing physical space to achieve romance. Elizabeth Bennett falls in love with Mr Darcy when she steps onto the grounds of Pemberley. Ingrid Bergman enters Rick’s Cafe one night, encroaching on Humphrey Bogart’s space and reigniting their love. Meg Ryan leaves Seattle to meet her Mr Right on the top of New York City’s most famous building.
Lovers move in and out of each other’s space and, historically, spatial impediments have been part of what constitutes romance. In our digital age, we still yearn for romance, but those obstacles no longer resonate.
Melissa Broder retains the fairytale quality of her first novel, Pisces.Credit: Joyce Kim
In Melissa Broder’s third novel, Death Valley, the unnamed narrator, a writer, has fallen out of love with her husband and believes they have none of those obstacles that might keep them together and their romance alive. What to do? She needs physical distance as a challenge to strengthen their relationship.
As her father lingers in the liminal state between consciousness and sleep in the ICU (where he’s been for the past five months after a car accident) she drives out to the middle of nowhere – the desert. But that’s not enough. Going places isn’t interesting in itself, because she and her husband can always connect via a smartphone.
She has to put her life on the line to resuscitate their relationship. So she checks into a hotel to “escape a feeling,” as she puts it, and goes into the wild: “I came to the desert because I wanted to be alone,” she tells us. “Now that I’m alone, it’s not what I want.”
As film historian Jeanine Basinger once said, a woman’s world is “an interior world, the only place she can truly call her own, and thus her natural state is mental or emotional, rather than geographical or historical”.
Our heroine hikes a trail and gets lost. Nobody knows she is there. She hasn’t got her antidepressants. Her water bottle is half empty. There’s no phone reception and anyway her phone (“O warm, beloved rectangle!”) is running out of juice.
But she is wearing her father’s army jacket. With this protective heirloom she stumbles upon a huge saguaro cactus and finds an opening into it. There she encounters her father as a child. Then, her father as a teenager. Then, her husband as a child. Then, her husband as a 20-year-old. It’s a “sober phenomenon. A gift.” Yet she is still lost. And her phone is about to die.
This temporal and spatial challenge becomes her fantasy of what she needs to restore her relationships with the two most important men in her life. She is longing for a quest; to understand romance as a quest. She traverses the desert in brinkmanship-like ways, ultimately to find her way home – to build romance again with her husband.
In Death Valley, Broder retains the fairytale quality of her first novel, Pisces. And like Pisces, where the two objects of the heroine’s greatest and gravest desire are non-human, here it is so too, in the form of a cactus.
Broder’s poetic sensibilities illuminate each sentence, embodying the vernal potency of a love poem. Her language is corporeal technicolour: in the Broder expanded universe, diarrhoea is “monsoon” or “volcanic”, urine tastes “bitter and salt-laden”. Wants are “tectonic” – as is often the case for women, like our heroine who is “not sure what I’m allowed to ask for”.
This eco-ribald experience reinvigorates her other love – that of writing novels, which is to say, her attempt to make herself immortal. “This is why I write,” she explains. “I do it for the alchemy.” This sorcery is what ultimately leads our heroine to understand her final lesson: “Love is not always a feeling, sometimes it’s a verb.”
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