(courtesy Bloomsbury.com)
One of the qualities most lauded among people under stress is the ability to go on face of incalculable and often heavily wearing odds.
And while resilience in any form is to be admired, what is frequently missed when we are admiringly placing people under great duress on pedestals is the fact that the human spirit can only take so much and that what we should be asking them is a very simple but highly revelatory question if answered honestly – “Are you OK?”
The woman at the heart of Melissa Broder’s wondrously good novel, Death Valley, is far from being OK, and in fact, has fled her home under the guise of a research trip for her latest novel for California’s high desert, an attempt escape a burgeoning emptiness inside her.
For month upon achingly exhaustive month, she has endured two great burdens – her husband’s ongoing chronic illness which he bears with stoic cheeriness but for which there is no ready explanation or treatment, and her father’s sustained stay in the ICU where he is drifting in and out of consciousness.
While she has a close relationship with her husband, able to joke with him even in the worst of circumstances, he is still desperately unwell, and the lion’s share of the pressure for maintaining the practical aspects of the relationship are unceasingly falling on her.
I wake up at noon, and I’m ready to go back to sleep. When I’m not visiting my father, all I want to do is sleep. I’ve always loved a nap (depression), but now I have full-on performance anxiety about staying awake. No matter what I’m doing, a voice inside me is saying, But you could be sleeping. Why not sleep instead?
And while she shares the burden of tending to her father with her sister, with whom she is very close, and her irascible mother, her relationship with her difficult father has never been a healthy one, something which plays on her mind over and over when she visits him in the hospital and he reacts, when he’s awake, in some fairly hurtful ways.
She has a lot on her plate, and while you could laud her for her ability to keep on keeping on, the truth is that any resilience she once possessed is well and truly long gone, and she is running on the fumes of whatever innate ability she once possessed to weather these twin crises.
So, she goes to a Best Western in the desert, staffed by helpful but quirky staff who direct her to a walking trail out in the desert where she will supposedly find great enjoyment soaking in the natural surroundings, and hopefully healing her soul a little in the process.
What she finds on an otherwise unremarkable trail is a giant Saguaro cactus which should not be there; it’s native to the Sonoran desert of California and its presence so far north is an anomaly in and of itself, but one made all the more bizarre by the fact that if she steps inside the gash on the cactus’s side, she finds herself in the mother of all weird Alice in Wonderland therapy sessions, taken straight into a realm where the past comes alive in ways that defy reality and which feels like some sort of strange fever dream sprung unnaturally to life.
(courtesy official author site)
Quite what happens in these sessions inside the cactus which, by the way, no one else can see including the motel staff who wonder if perhaps their guest has seen a little too much sun, is best left to the reading of Death Valley but suffice to say, that while these visions are strange and almost unreal, they are deeply emotional and cut to the very heart of her pain and why it is that these two crises have taken such an extraordinary toll on her.
Written in sentences that are witty, insightful, heartfelt and beautifully descriptive, Death Valley takes a fairly out there idea, that of a Cheshire Cat of a cactus who winks in and out of existence but only for one person, and makes it feels deeply human and fantastically emotional in ways that will really move you.
There is a great deal of fun to be had and even as the woman deals with the past colliding head on with the present, in ways that feels a little traumatic but which end up providing her with unexpected healing, she is also able to laugh at some of the stranger aspects of her very odd desert experience.
The beauty of Death Valley which encompasses you with its scene setting so wonderfully that you want to keep turning the pages to read more of its deliciously wise, funny and illuminatingly comfortable prose, is that it takes the unusual and the very real and brings them together affectingly well.
[The woman is addressing her husband in absentia] Miraculous what you have done with love. Alone in your desert. Not alone, but feeling alone, because you were with me, and I did not understand until I understood (and will forget again if I make it out of here alive).
Not alone. But all the while between us a great divide.
How did you do it? How did you stay kind?
If you have ever felt like life is overtaking and subsuming you, and that while you have no choice but to put one foot in front of the other, you are drowning far more than you are waving, then reading Death Valley will feel like its own kind of very creative, witty and heartfelt therapy.
You will identify with the protagonist in fairly profound ways, with her journey through living grief and emotional exhaustion one many of us have endured at one time or another.
The cleverness and creativity of this just-long enough novel never exists at the expense of real hard-hitting emotions which are allowed the time they need to breathe and be expressed in a novel that goes hard and deep but in ways that feel nuanced and light too.
Death Valley is a marvellously wonderful thing, and while it’s trippy as hell at times, not least when one hike ends up extending itself far beyond what the woman had planned, you always feel as if you are in touch with real, honest, and true emotions, the kind that afflict you when life piles on the pressure but which you are not always given the permission to admit to.
People, even closest to you, want you to be an overcomer, a survivor, a resilient icon for the ages, but we are so often not that person though we wish to be, and the great gift of Death Valley is that, in ways that heal and soothe, you can admit you don’t have it all together, and in so doing, you may just find the healing and the relief, and hopefully, the path forward you have needed all along.