ELEGY, SOUTHWEST

A married couple has life-changing realizations during a road trip across the American Southwest.

Watts’ elegant sophomore novel follows Lewis, who’s from Arizona, and Australian Eloise—a married couple living in New York City—on a convoluted road trip through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah. The main purpose of the trip is to allow Eloise to study the Colorado River for her dissertation and give Lewis, who works for a foundation dedicated to land art, an opportunity to check on a project they’d been supporting. Quietly, Eloise also hopes their adventure will help her husband move through the grief of his mother’s death, which has been consuming their lives as he seeks out increasingly unorthodox ways to heal. While traveling across the barren landscape, Eloise begins to wonder if she’s pregnant. She struggles with whether to tell Lewis—who has never felt further away, despite their physical proximity—or if she should give in to her instinct to “continue to suspend [herself] in the amber of waiting.” The trip serves as the novel’s throughline while Eloise, the narrator, surfaces past memories and alludes to a very different present. The book is written in the second person as Eloise addresses Lewis, discussing their complicated marriage, love, art, death, climate change, wildfires, and America’s strange, dangerous, and expansive beauty, to name a few. Watts writes beautifully about grief, loneliness, and memory. One particularly poignant moment happens when Eloise realizes their future child will know their grandmother only through stories. She describes this as “an odd sort of mourning—grieving a future I didn’t know I’d even been so certain of.” This sorrowful knowing permeates the whole novel, which is less concerned with plot than with cataloging the couple’s relationship. Whether in love or nature, Watts’ prose artfully renders the mundane and majestic in equal measure.

A quiet and sweeping portrait of a marriage teetering on the edge.