Elegy Southwest: A Poetic Ode to a Vanishing Australian Landscape

Despite their adventurous, Kerouac-inspired promise, road trip novels often delve into themes of constraint rather than freedom. After all, they take place in cars—spaces that impose close quarters and limited existential maneuvering. In Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts joins a notable group of literary women—such as Lorrie Moore, Olivia Sudjic, and Jesmyn Ward—who have harnessed this format to explore familial and cultural reckonings. Each storyteller sends a complicated pair, along with their ghosts, on one last transformative journey.

Elegy, Southwest is rich with allusions, particularly reminiscent of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019). Both novels feature urban couples immersed in the highbrow precariat (think academics and artists) making their way to Arizona. While Luiselli’s characters drive from New York to the US-Mexico border—against a backdrop of migrant children being torn from their families—Watts’s protagonists, Eloise and Lewis, journey from Las Vegas to the Hoover Dam, tracing the troubled path of the Colorado River, described as “dwindling water in this drying landscape.” As they travel, wildfires devastate northern California, overlaying their marital turmoil with a wider humanitarian crisis.

Eloise serves as Watts’s narrator, reflecting on the trip through the lens of memory. Lewis may be deceased, and she finds herself searching for meaning in the remnants of their journey, much like one sifts through the ashes of a burned-down home. Every roadside snack, billboard, and peculiar desert plant becomes a point of reflection. Her narrative unfolds as part autopsy, part requiem, and part confession. So much went unsaid during that fire-scarred trip—who or what was Eloise seeking to protect?

The novel ultimately reveals a dual portrait of decay: the failing river and the crumbling marriage, both echoing a singular fear—the “terror of the tap running dry.” The language we use to describe water also resonates with our notions of love. This is Watts’s second venture into a fictional world steeped in the symbolism of water, following her debut, The Inland Sea (2020). The Australian-born author navigates these themes with remarkable skill.

This duality represents both the strength and the shortcoming of Elegy, Southwest—a work that is intensely deliberate in its intentions. “A desert serves as a kind of objective correlative,” Watts writes, “an apt metaphor for the struggle for the soul.” Yet, she often succumbs to the allure of this metaphor. Like the grieving Eloise, not a single detail slips by without being imbued with significance. The result is a novel filled with intricate introspection and heavy symbolism, where personal heartbreak intertwines seamlessly with ecological devastation—forming one overwhelming, shared grief. This fusion can sometimes feel excessive and even self-indulgent, yet it captures the stark reality of life in the Anthropocene. The world may be faltering, but we continue to live and love. What other choice do we have?

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic.