Melissa Broder’s newest novel Death Valley follows a path tread by her previous books, offering an emotionally prosaic story made mystical by a core magic realist conceit. In Broder’s first novel The Pisces, sex and romance addiction is explored through a hot but morbid merman. In Milk Fed, her second, the quest to understand an eating disorder is flavored by a golem. In Death Valley, the stages of grief are entered through a giant saguaro cactus.
The book opens with its unnamed narrator, a middle-aged woman in her fifties, arriving at a Best Western in a small California desert town. She’s left behind her chronically ill husband and ICU-bound father in Los Angeles, ostensibly to work on a novel but actually to escape the miasma of mortality surrounding her life. Her father, who has been resuscitated twice over his six months in the ICU, is increasingly unknowable to her, sending her into a spiral of preemptive grief. Though her husband has been sick for nine years, his new symptom of labored breathing sparks guilty disgust and resentment in her, solidifying that she is no longer attracted to him.
From this foundation, Death Valley’s plot is simple. One of the front desk workers at the Best Western suggests a hike to the narrator, leading her to discover a saguaro cactus so massive that she can crawl inside it—a seemingly impossible treasure, given she’s in the Mojave Desert and saguaros only grow in the Sonoran. Inside the cactus, she first encounters her father as a child; upon a second visit, she meets her father as a teenager and her husband as a child. Attempting a third visit before she returns to Los Angeles, the narrator cannot find the gargantuan saguaro, sending her further into the desert where she becomes dangerously lost. Her journey melds the natural landscape with emotional territory, as she reflects on love as a verb and death as inevitable.
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Death Valley
Within this elegant container, all of Melissa Broder’s trademarks and considerable skills are on view. Though the media’s constant chatter around “unlikable female characters” is exhausting, it’s necessary to invoke here, as Broder is a master of exposing the inner lives of her narrators without a thought for their palatability. Death Valley’s protagonist makes terrible choices and harbors socially unspeakable thoughts, extra fraught thanks to her self-awareness. “What kind of person gets angry at her husband for breathing?” our narrator asks, but can’t change her gut reaction. Her desire to be “the magic daughter” suffuses her memories of interacting with her father in his hospital bed, an all-too-realistic portrayal of emotional need overtaking concern for a loved one. She wishes she were different, wanders into the desert hoping to become different, but the most she can do at the end is grasp that despite her “terror–of life and dying and loving and all of it”, she will keep going. Broder’s denial of a tidy ending is powerful, refusing the mainstream character arc of a woman going on a journey to Find Herself.
Broder’s affinity for the unfiltered narrator also renders Death Valley hilarious. Lost in the desert, our heroine’s acerbic yet whimsical thoughts undercut the looming possibility of death by exposure. “I want to be stupid and brave,” she declares in the desert. “I think I have the stupid part down (woman walks into desert with less than a gallon of water and doesn’t tell anyone where she is going).” Following a rabbit she has dubbed Teen Bun for its small size, the narrator discovers a group of young rabbits and proclaims, “I have discovered the exclusive, underage hare club: a lagomorph VIP room.” Moreover, if a reader (like me) happens to have the puerile sense of humor too often reserved for teenage boys, there is enough pissing and farting in this book to fill a rest stop bathroom.
The inherent comedy of the narration keeps it from becoming weighed down by its own profundity. As truthful as cyclical thinking may be, the main character’s constant analysis of her feelings towards her husband, her father, herself, her mother, death, and love may not be for everyone. For every surprising beat of insight and gorgeous writing, there’s another page of the narrator describing her husband’s suffering and how much better he manages it than she does. The text seems to claim that this is the point:
“I deflect my mind to a not-here, because the here is too scary, it hurts too much, which is why it’s easier for me to be there for my sick father than my sick husband; the depth of my sick husband’s here, he needs me, and the need makes it a vortex, a here I could get stuck in, trapped…”
Broder may intend for the reader to find themself mirroring the narrator’s position; if she struggles to stay present for her husband’s pain, of course we will struggle to remain in the cyclone of hers. The novel encourages this meta reading by being holistically self-referential. The narrator’s life resembles Broder’s, in that Broder currently acts as caregiver for her debilitatingly ill husband. Moreover, Death Valley’s protagonist is writing a novel about a woman who runs away from her sick husband and has an epiphany in the desert. “I think I will base the desert revelation in my novel around something having to do with pee,” states the narrator, right after taking a piss herself and realizing that “you could probably chart my desert demise through the waning glory of my pee (a whole character arc as told in urine).”
Such cleverness might be an acquired taste, but Melissa Broder has embraced working in a niche. She is one of a growing number of authors working in weird fiction, writing books caught between literary fiction ruminating on the Great Emotions (grief, love, horniness) and metaphor-laden fantasy. For the former, there are far too many talking rocks in Death Valley. For the latter, there aren’t enough. While Broder’s speculative world-building does leave something to be desired, her dalliance with the uncanny gives her work its strongest charge. Death Valley’s cactus portal to Freudian encounters and its opinionated minerals seem as likely to be a product of the dehydrated protagonist’s mind as real, but it is a testament to Broder’s skill that this facile question ultimately doesn’t matter. The primary interest of the novel isn’t in its ambiguity but in its capture of an elusive, liminal, and genuine phase of feeling.
The truth is, I saw myself in Death Valley, even when the novel lagged in a bog of overwrought reflectiveness. Perhaps I saw myself most in those bogs, as will other readers. Whether or not Death Valley sparks such recognition, it is nonetheless a testament to Melissa Broder’s power to deliver a raw and original story.
Death Valley is published by Scribner.
Maura Krause is a writer and Barrymore-nominated theatrical director, currently pursuing their MFA in Writing at California College for the Arts.
