On its surface, the premise for Melissa Broder’s Death Valley is straightforward. A woman ventures into the High Desert to work on her novel, while also escaping her father’s impending death and her husband’s chronic illness. But Death Valley is about as uncomplicated as the desert terrain is barren. It’s a complex ecosystem, and for Broder, who adds magical-realist elements such as talking rocks and flowers and a giant cactus where her unnamed narrator discovers child versions of both her father and her husband, it becomes a vehicle for grappling with existential questions.
Leaving Los Angeles, the narrator takes refuge in a Best Western “in the valley of Death Valley.” Place is key here. The hotel is on the edge of town, and “beyond it lies nothingness.” It is “cozy but anonymous; simple, yet not depressing.” This functioning on the razor’s edge, between oblivion and existence, is the closest Broder’s character can get to understanding what her father is experiencing.
We’re quick to pick up on the inner turmoil. Whether considering her career, her marriage, her body, or her father, she is always in her head. As she explains: “But for me—sense dulled by a constant deluge of opinions and judgments—every moment is a house of oppressive thoughts to be escaped.” This is not a novel with sweeping desert descriptions. The narrator acknowledges from the outset that she falls short when conveying nature. “How many times can you use the word arid?” she asks.
Candid and neurotic, and self-deprecating in a way that masks her intelligence and selfishness, Broder’s narrator can admit that she’s the kind of person who makes another’s struggle all about her. But that’s different from accepting that her father is dying. Instead, she believes she can make sense of love and grief. “I used to be a seeker,” she tells us. “I looked everywhere for the answer. I thought that anyone outside myself—any psychic, astrologer, healer, tarot reader—knew more than I did.” She is doing the best she can, in other words, which includes everything from seeking out answers on Reddit threads and in literature to venturing into the desert without a hat.
After finding the giant cactus on her first hike, she returns again and again. On her fourth excursion, the cactus disappears, and the narrator gets lost searching for it. The novel shifts into a survival narrative, where the narrator must confront her fears about her writing career and her husband’s illness and their relationship, as well as her father and the limits of her own aging body. If this sounds like a lot, it is. “Miraculous what you have done with love,” she reflects of her husband as she runs out of water. “Alone in your own desert. Not alone, but feeling alone, because you were with me, and I did not understand, however much I would have wanted to, however much I tried; I could not understand until I understood (and will forget again if I make it out of here alive).” The newfound self-awareness is undercut by a scene in which she gets turned on by the thought of her husband saying, My wife is dead. “I pet the fur on my groin,” she observes, “then stick my middle finger up inside. Dry as the atmosphere (she died as she lived: fingering herself in the dark with the summit maybe nearly in sight).” Reading this, I laughed out loud.
Still, forgetting newfound wisdom and disregarding it are two different emotional forces.
Broder’s humor can be grating at times, akin to lightening the mood with zany antics. And because Death Valley is a novel about a novelist writing a novel that mirrors this one, it feels like a cop-out, a way to pad big themes for easy digestion. It’s true that unraveling requires humor, as the narrator points out in regard to another novel that she has deemed too elegant, pristine, and assonant. Yet when humor acts as a repellent to growth—indeed, as a reaction to emotional labor—it feels childish.
As a comparison, consider the moment the narrator first encounters the cactus. “Looking up is like looking up inside the nave of a cathedral,” she explains. “What I see in that arching darkness makes me feel compelled to pray.” Except rather than prayer, what comes to her mind is the song “Sh-Boom,” by the Chords, a favorite of her father’s. It’s a beautiful and poignant moment, and Broder gives it the space to sit there. No humor to soften the emotion, and all the better for it.
Broder doesn’t hide that this is her most personal novel. Her own father died in 2021 after an accident, and Broder is a caregiver for her husband. It’s a bit like literary nesting dolls, or maybe more accurately, a narrative cat’s cradle. The plot threads through, around, and within, creating or collapsing space between the author and her text. As a work with elements of autofiction, it’s up there with Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, although stylistically Broder is more like Eve Babitz with a Twitter account.
And like Babitz, Broder is concerned with female paradox—how we can be independent and vulnerable, empathetic yet selfish. “I’m here because I put myself here,” the narrator thinks once she realizes she’s lost. “Or because I was put here?” It’s the nature of existential questions to remain existential. There are no easy answers. But that doesn’t mean Broder’s narrator will stop asking. Her search for meaning, like all of ours, will continue. As looped and singular as a desert sunset.•
Liska Jacobs is the author, most recently, of The Pink Hotel. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, the Millions, Chicago Review of Books, and Minor Literatures among others. She has an MFA from the University of California, Riverside.
