— Melissa Broder’s “Death Valley” follows a grieving narrator through her reconnection to the earth.
By Claire Vaye Watkins
In Thomas Merton’s 1960 translation of the teachings of the fourth-century Christian monks known as the Desert Fathers, “Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence … now what more should I do? The elder rose in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like 10 lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?”
In her 2021 novel “Harrow,” the 21st-century monk Joy Williams wrote: “I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.”
Melissa Broder’s incandescent new novel, “Death Valley,” is, like her desert forebears, ecstatically awake to the world’s astonishments. When the unnamed heroine arrives from Los Angeles to the edge of alleged nothingness in the Mojave Desert, she feels “empty”: Having lately faced her father’s “five-second death,” and then his resurrection, and then his subsequent fall into unconsciousness, she is both rebelling against impermanence (a.k.a. writing a novel) and hurtling toward it.
A spiritual seeker, sober except for her self-diagnosed internet addiction, the narrator tries to make a zendo of Reddit, with surprisingly mixed results. “If I’m honest,” she says, “I came to escape a feeling — an attempt that’s already going poorly, because unfortunately I’ve brought myself with me, and I see, as the last pink light creeps out into infinity, that I am still the kind of person who makes another person’s coma all about me.”
Immediately the Mojave starts working its miracles on this sad, horny woman who feels afraid of the sky, judged by the moon and “cosmically needy.” She soon observes that, “wandering around in the desert, there’s no need to play hard to get with God.” When she shines her love light on two perfectly drawn employees of a Best Western, they in turn point her to a mysterious hiking trail. Buddhists tell the parable of the second arrow of suffering, “the feeling about the feeling,” as the Silver Jews put it. In prose of unparalleled style and seemingly effortless bravery, Broder’s narrator shoots an entire quiver of emotional arrows into herself and then, like Frida Kahlo’s little deer, bounds into the wilderness, heart open, wounds weeping, no hat, not enough water.
Despite fearing herself and her novel “too earthbound,” she digs in, getting as earthy as Mary Austin or Ana Mendieta by climbing into a magical Saguaro cactus. Here Broder’s riotously original ecosexual surrealism performs an uncanny transubstantiation, the novel becoming a survival adventure that couldn’t have been better written by Jack London himself. Broder’s euphoric plotting and winning characters combine with a gift for desert description (that pink light creeping out into infinity) reminiscent of Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” I tried to ration this book but guzzled.
If I have a gripe, it’s that Joshua trees don’t have “leaves,” a word Broder uses twice. Spikes, spears, daggers, tines, needles — but, by my code, never leaves. Maybe that’s trifling, maybe not. If we can learn, as Broder all but implores, to worship a land that would impale the sentimental, leaf-stroking impulse of the pastoral, then maybe we can love the whole world as it deserves to be loved. Given that the protagonist meets God in the Mojave, what to make of the fact that many of the places that awaken us to the world’s astonishments are slated for sacrifice?
Much of Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve are, as of this writing, inaccessible after flooding from Tropical Storm Hilary. In 2020 a fire burned over 43,000 acres of Cima Dome, one of the largest Joshua tree forests in the world. This summer, another fire more than doubled that carnage. Meanwhile “green” capitalists are exploiting the climate emergency by grabbing unbroken, formerly public, pilgrimage-worthy expanses of the Mojave and the Great Basin for water-intensive mines, geothermal plants at biodiverse springs and poorly sited industrial solar arrays on critical tortoise habitats.
“Death Valley” is a triumph, a ribald prayer for sensuality and grace in the face of profound loss, a hilarious revolt against the aggressive godlessness, dehumanization and fear plaguing our time. All 10 of Melissa Broder’s finger lamps are blazing. Why not be totally changed into fire?
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