“But how do you just experience things?” asks the narrator of Melissa Broder’s Death Valley, a surrealistic tale of survival from the author of Milk Fed. She rejects her own question just before she gets lost in the desert: “[to] resolve the doubt and provide a path forward – this is why I write…. This is how I experience things.”
Death Valley is that inner core of the journey narrative: a story of transformative experience. Swirling with big questions about life and death, grief and love, it is a novel about writing a novel, which is to say, it is an existential consideration.
The story opens as the narrator decamps to a Best Western on the edge of high California desert. She is there to do research for the book she is writing, but her mind is preoccupied with her father, who has been in an intensive care unit and on the edge of death for more than a year. Additionally, there is the complex of concern and resentment that she feels towards her husband, who has endured an undiagnosable illness for many years.
Hiking a desert trail, she encounters a cactus so fantastically large, she can enter it. Inside, she meets apparitions of her father as a child, then as a teen, and later, of her husband as a well man. But this is not the transformative experience. The next day, she finds the cactus has disappeared. Spurred by an anthropomorphised rock – “Seek and ye shall seek,” it says – the narrator starts a cactus-search and proceeds to get lost in the desert.
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In a landscape of blinding sameness and delirium heat, her struggle for survival is spooled with thoughts about family and the idea on which her book-in-progress must resolve: “that love is not always a feeling, sometimes it’s a verb.” Death Valley carries its big questions lightly, with humour rather than pretension. The musings about love and language feel like natural motifs, not trite revelations. With its digressions and a looping style that operates thematically and structurally, Death Valley has the concentric quality of ring composition – and possibly internet rabbit holes.
Towards the end of the novel, the narrator writes the word “love” in the sand, crosses it out, and writes, “is”. The passage that follows asserts that to love is to be here. It provides the existential resolution that “here” is both a feeling and a verb.
