Surreal is a word often used to describe Melissa Broder’s fiction, and there is a bounty of surrealism on display in her third novel Death Valley, especially for a reader coming to her work for the first time. It’s important, however, to acknowledge the realism and world building that set the stage for much of the fantastical elements that come later. Death Valley is a modern fairytale about a Los Angeles writer who seeks refuge and creative inspiration in the desert while her father fights for his life after a car crash. Death hovers, and drapes the delicate psyche of our protagonist’s mind at every turn with bleak, obsessive and self-absorbed thoughts. She is hoping big skies, arid desert plains and a Best Western motel will shift her into a better headspace, and give her courage to face her father’s imminent death and her husband’s mysterious chronic illness. (He has seen 27 doctors in nine years, which is taking a toll on their marriage.)
“I chose this desert town as the scene of my escape because it’s the fictional home of a cartoon bighorn sheep that enchanted both my father and me in my childhood … ” There’s a feather lightness to the protagonist’s voice as she forecasts the otherworldliness of her impending adventure. One of the strengths of Death Valley is Broder’s ability to track her heroine’s emotional vulnerabilities and quirks in a manner that makes her readers familiars on the journey. We anticipate revelations as the protagonist makes her pilgrimage into the unforgiving vastness of the desert with humour, wit and childhood memories of happier days as the primary tools in her survival kit.
“My check-in experience has the efficiency I’ve come to expect from Best Western, coupled with an added warmth I find soothing, even stimulating, without being claustrophobic. This is thanks to the attention of a woman at the front desk whose name tag reads Jethra. And Jethra is my type. She is shaped like a ripe tomato.” This is a hilarious scene, with some lovely wordplay on the Best Western breakfast go-to: the blueberry muffin. Broder’s protagonist is a former addict. Sex is one of her past addictions and so she finds herself attracted to both Jethra and Zip, a smug young front desk clerk who knows everything about cacti. It’s Jethra who tells her about the nearby hiking trail.
There are three types of landscape in Death Valley: the desert itself, the landscape of technology, and the realm of the human heart. There are numerous calls and Facetime sessions throughout the novel between the protagonist and her father in his hospital bed, or her sick husband in their LA apartment. There’s something sad, sweet and at times gut-wrenchingly funny in her inability to communicate with the two men in her life, as well as her strong-willed superstitious mother, honestly and directly.
But feelings must go somewhere and in this narrative they merge with the desert landscape, where on her first outing our protagonist encounters a big mystical cactus with a slit in its middle. In no time, she is climbing into its belly and encountering her father as a child and later a teenager. These scenes take on the gleam of an acid trip, the cactus a shaman’s sweat lodge with visions not of the future but of the past.
Neither Jethra nor Zip believe the protagonist when she describes the towering cactus. But she is a searcher and a seeker, and more intense magical encounters await her with other loved ones. There is something about the desert that invites writers to map their imaginations on to its diverse landscape, both barren and lush. There were moments when I thought of Joan Didion’s White Album, specifically the essay James Pike, American, about the theologian who wandered off into the Judean desert with his third wife and two cans of Coke and died. It is a fact that in the desert, humans perish quickly. In Death Valley, a human could die without water in 14 hours.
Broder has given us a protagonist who talks out loud to nature – and nature often responds. More than half of this hallucinatory survival tale takes place in the desert. Broder employs every tool in her arsenal to propel Death Valley forward and sustain momentum, but there are chapters when the novel strains under the weight of suspended disbelief. The insight and sharp humour lose some of their luminosity and power in the blurred landscape – which may be the point.
One wonders if the surreal extremities of global warming we are witnessing firsthand will require more from writers who use the wilderness as their backdrop. Right now, it’s too soon to know. But Broder has the advantage of exploring the extremities of the heart and psyche – love, fear, anxiety, addiction, death – and holding them up as a mirror. She is smart enough to give us a protagonist who is more hopeful than helpless, and engaging enough to keep readers wondering what she will encounter next.
• Death Valley by Melissa Broder is published by Bloomsbury (£13.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
