Elegy, Southwest by Madeline Watts is set during the deadly 2018 Californian Camp Fires that burnt for weeks and destroyed a number of communities, leaving the state in a blanket of smoke. The relationship between Eloise and her husband Lewis flounders during a road trip. They are following the Colorado River across California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. 

Climate change isn’t like war, because you can’t see it happen… And it’s also incredibly slow until it’s incredibly fast.

Eloise is undertaking academic research on the river and its likely demise in the future due to climate change. Lewis who works for an art foundation is struggling with the death of his mother from cancer and smoking a lot of weed. He is inconsolable.  

I wanted to be across the literature. As though by studying the canon of death I would be able to anticipate the future… I was reading for you, for when you fell apart.

Eloise grapples with her husbands detachment as they drive across the desert. She decides to keep her suspicion she is pregnant from him as she feels him distancing from her. The story is told from the future when Eloise is sifting through events and searching for resolution after Lewis is gone. 

Afterwards, you told me it was part of what you loved most about those weeks.

The cover of Elegy, Southwest is beautiful. The story is a cinematic, meandering, slow burn about personal and environmental decay and the grief that accompanies those deteriorations.