Can the Classic Road Trip Novel Survive the Climate Crisis?

Climate change is conspicuously absent from most realist, literary fiction set in the present day. Hurricanes, wildfires, floods, droughts and other natural disasters are part of our daily lives, yet they’re absent, save for brief mentions of a news clip for a college protest from much of our fiction. 

Madeleine Watts’ works have set out to change that. Her debut, The Inland Sea, is a coming-of-age tale about a college student and emergency dispatch operator in Sydney, Australia, whose life starts to descend into chaos as she grapples with both large scale disasters, like wildfires and more personal ones. 

Her new book, Elegy, Southwest, out last month, considers a married couple in crisis as they road trip across the American Southwest. Wildfires rage, the Colorado River is drying up, and Eloise and Lewis navigate the grief — him over the loss of his mother, her over the sense that she no longer recognizes their relationship.  

Watts and I talked via Zoom about road trip novels, why the American Southwest is such a resonant place for her, and what it means to write elegies in the backdrop of the climate crisis. 

Courtney DuChene: I’m struck by how Elegy, Southwest juxtaposes interpersonal crises against the apocalyptic scale of the climate crisis. How do you see the resonance between the personal and the struggle we’re all in against climate change? 

Madeleine Watts:  I think the first thing I was interested in making clear in the book is the way in which everything that happens to us — every calamity, every terrible thing — happens now within the shadow of the climate crisis, because it’s in the air around us even if it’s not ever present in our minds. 

Climate change is slow until it’s very fast, and it’s invisible until it’s not. It’s always there. I’m very interested in the fact that personal experience, at least in my adult life, has always been threaded through and shadowed by anxiety about the climate crisis, and grief and fear. I think they bleed into one another in interesting ways — sometimes productive, sometimes not productive. Sometimes I find it strange that it doesn’t show up that much in art. 

CD: It’s a theme that also carries over from your first novel, [The Inland Sea]. How have you changed your approach to this theme between one book in the next? 

MW: So this book, the first sparks of it were happening when I was doing the American launch for the first book. So when I wrote the first book, it was very much a first book. I started off thinking I was writing one thing, that it became something completely different. I didn’t start out thinking that I was writing about climate change in that first book, I thought I was writing something completely different. Then my interests in those sorts of things just kept bleeding through and I paid attention to what I was writing about rather than being really mindful about what I was writing from the get go. 

The first sentences of this book came out of some stuff I wrote in April 2020,  right in the early stages of the pandemic. But I actually started to figure out what I could do with those things when I was having interviews like this and people were asking me questions about the way that I had written climate change into the first book and I had answers for them, but I was then forced to really articulate those things and really think about it for myself. 

At the same time, I started doing a lot of teaching, and I was teaching a lot of courses on writing about climate change, and nature writing and things like that. It was in the process of answering those questions in public and thinking in an academic way, that I started to have much more developed ideas about how I specifically want to answer these questions. 

I love a plot-driven novel, but I don’t know that that standard novel that stems from the 19th century is very good at capturing some of these things. It’s a form that came from a different time. I was interested in finding a different structure that could be relatively digressive but still come back to a particular point and that could also tell the personal story of something that is happening to you right now, while making clear that the things that happen to us in our present are intricately connected to things in the past that might seem like they have nothing to do with us and a future that might seem like they have nothing to do with us. 

Those were a lot of the things I was thinking about. I was reading a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me, who have thought a lot about climate change. I talked a lot when the first book came out about Amitav Ghosh and I continue to think that Amitav Ghosh is really amazing.  I was also thinking a lot about Daisy Hildyard and her ideas in The Second Body. And I kept thinking that was sort of like a big, big thing in the back of my mind while I was writing this book. 

So this book is a more considered response to some of those questions that were present in The Inland Sea, but I was too young and naive to have good answers about four or five years ago. 

CD: It’s interesting, too, that The Inland Sea is kind of this coming of age story set against this. And in this book, the narrator is more in her midlife as she is considering these questions. 

MW: Yeah, that’s probably following my own aging. 

CD: You talked about how the form of the novel that we’ve traditionally come to know, which started in the 19th century, doesn’t really work today. In this book, you’ve written a road trip novel, which I think of as being really an American and an American West more specifically form. How did the form of the road trip novel suit your needs and how did you want to diverge with it in this book to focus on these themes? 

MW: The impetus for this book came out of really, completely falling in love with the American Southwest in a way that you fall in love with a person. I’ve never loved a place or a landscape so much. I wasn’t living there. I was living in New York City. but my mind very much wanted to be there. 

And when you’re thinking about it and when you’re absorbing secondary media about it when you’re not there, there’s a lot of road trip stuff. It was a conscious choice to have that road trip element of it. I did two research trips in 2018 and 2019 knowing that I wanted to write about water in the Southwest and they formed a lot of the background detail about the physical landscape and that was in a car. So to some extent it was sort of born out of something relatively unimaginative. It was just how I had inhabited those landscapes. 

I also really wanted to play with the tropes of the road trip. 

The other thing that I was thinking about a lot when I was writing it was the ways in which I have most responded to road trip novels and depictions of America. It’s always been influenced by the fact that I’m not American and I was trying to find my own place and think about how the ways in which I, as an outsider, inhabit these landscapes, the ways I feel American and I don’t feel American, the ways I will never be American, but have sort of fundamentally become American. It’s a real in-between thing that I certainly didn’t realize when I blithely moved to America in 2013 and that I didn’t realize would impact me for the rest of my life. The things that I was thinking a lot about were the kinds of work that outsiders to America who have made things like that. So I reread Lolita a couple of times. 

CD: I was thinking about Lolita so much when I read the book. 

MW: It’s the best road trip novel and it’s so gorgeous. I would look at some of the descriptions — there’s a way that Nabokov notices America, which is just so fundamentally that of an outsider. I reread the very first sections and there would be these ways that he would describe these sublime forests and birds and the sugar that’s on the table at a diner. 

Lolita is definitely in this book in that respect. There were also a few films I was rewatching, American films like Paris, Texas and The American Friend. Early on, when I was writing the book, I went to see Alice in the Cities at Film Farm. And that starts in the U.S. and it’s a road trip around the U.S., but then it takes off and then it’s a road trip movie around Germany. And so it was transplanting, the American road trip movie, but it was no longer connected to America and the physical geography of the United States. It’s this international idea of America. 

There were other things that I was returning to,like travelogs written in the 20th century by like Simone de Beauvoir, where they would travel around America and they would have very French things to say about what they were seeing 

I kept reaching for those ways of talking about the landscape and thinking about the landscape, from a slightly outsider’s perspective. I didn’t make a decision about what nationality the first person narrator was going to be until I was halfway through the first draft and then it became very clear that she had to be Australian because I’m not really capable of seeing the world without my own Australianness. I am not a creative or good enough writer of the first person to be able to take my own experiences out of it. There are whole digressions about eucalyptus trees because I’m an Australian and that’s what I see. 

CD: There are ways in which Eloise, the narrator, is responding to both the man-made artificiality of West — neon signs and buildings in a desert — and also the natural artificiality, through the non-native plants she recognizes as being from Australia. It underscores that this is a place that Americans built out of a somewhat natural environment. I had a geology teacher who told me that people should not be living in the American West. The land is too young and too unstable. 

MW: I’ve been told that. Whenever I try to figure out what it is that draws me to the Southwest, I think about how the Southwest of the United States and the Australia that I grew up in looks really, really similar. They have the same sorts of weather, the same sorts of systems, like wildfires and like floods. It’s the same kind of weather. You have really mild winters. 

So some of the things that I would see in the Southwest, which I’ve worked into Eloise’s understanding, are just things that struck me as really different. Like the Southwest is in a megadrought. I grew up in a drought in Australia. I grew up under water restrictions. There would sometimes be stories on the news about people getting into a proper fight with somebody who needed to be hospitalized because one guy had been hosing down his driveway and that  was against water restrictions and someone else would come along and beat him up. I respond really viscerally when I see somebody hosing the cement or hosing the pavement. It makes me feel very uncomfortable and I think that you can’t do that with water. And I would see people hosing down cement in Phoenix, and I was like, you have so little water. What are you doing?

And because  it often felt like driving through somewhere that I was incredibly familiar with, it was a very uncanny feeling of being in those landscapes. That’s my own thing, but I felt it was useful to bring into Eloise’s personality and understanding because she can sort of see and narrate this place as an outsider and notice these things. When you’re used to being in a place, it’s harder to see what’s strange about where you live and where you’re really comfortable. Sometimes you need somebody to come in and say, l this is crazy. But by the same token, she’s [Eloise] always aware that this is not her home and there is that sort of distance. 

CD: You mentioned when you went to the Southwest, you fell in love with it as someone would a person and in some ways, that is what Eloise has done in the novel. She’s there with her husband, Lewis, who is from the Southwest. There’s a similar attempt to control the uncontrollable that happens with the landscape and Lewis as a character — he’s trying to control his own body and his own grief. … Whereas Eloise is in this particular state of indecisiveness which doesn’t quite resolve by the end of the book. I’m curious how you see the characters acting as foils for one another and how that speaks to Eloise’s broader relationship to the place? 

MW: I think that both of those characters are in this state of real transition. The title of the book came to me before anything else —or very, very early on. I knew that it was going to be called Elegy, Southwest. Then I went and — because I’m diligent — I read like four books on the history of the elegy to make sure that I knew what I was talking about. I was very interested in when you write an elegy, to some extent, it’s an attempt to control the grief, but you also can’t write an elegy without your own shadow falling across the thing that you elegize because you’re writing it. That kind of conundrum is there in anyone’s elegiac writing. 

I wanted that to be there between those characters that there is this attempt to control particular things, particularly about their bodies, that can’t quite be controlled and that’s mirrored in the landscape. It’s not necessarily one to one. It’s not that deliberate, but it is how they are. It’s how they’re moving through things. 

I knew that it was a book about grief. It’s a book that deliberately presents itself at the beginning as being about one type of grief and then introduces three or four other different types of grief so by the end there’s a spectrum of grief. I was very interested in making sure that it was represented as ambiguous grief. So that it becomes clear that the things that Eloise is grieving don’t have a resolution. They don’t have an answer. They don’t have an ending. 

When a grief is ambiguous — like if somebody dies, but you don’t know where the body is, if somebody just disappears — it creates this sort of ripple. Grief generally becomes something that you live around, but there is no answer. I think, particularly given the themes of the book generally, I didn’t want to present anything in the end that tied everything together or foreclosed that sense of ambiguity. There’s a tension between an attempt to control and the reality that you cannot control things, and it’s built into that in a relationship. 

CD: It’s interesting that the title and in some ways the form of the elegy came to you first. Is that the way you typically work? 

MW: No, never. I mean, this is the second book that I’ve written, so I don’t always know. But I know that The Inland Sea always had a different title until the very end. I wrote a novella in 2015 that I just controlled-searched some words in the document and picked it out right before I sent it off to an editor. 

I found it really, really helpful to be able to have the title [of Elegy, Southwest from the beginning], but I don’t think I’ll be lucky enough to have that happen a lot or ever again. 

CD: I hate titles so much. You talk about knowing you wanted to write a book about water. And in some ways this book is about water, and the lack of water with the Colorado River. But there’s also really strong imagery of fire, both wildfires and controlled burns in the book. At one point Eloise muses on O’Keeffe’s landscape paintings and their relationship to both water and a more dry, arid landscape and how that reflects an internal struggle O’Keeffe went through. Is there a way you think the imagery of fire and water in the book is working in a similar way for Eloise? 

MW: I think so. The Georgia O’Keefe story was one that I read in a really, really good biography of Georgia O’Keefe by Roxana Robinson. I was completely obsessed with this fact. It’s not cut and dry. Roxana Robinson is surmising. But Georgia O’ Keefe had a breakdown when she was about 35 and she couldn’t look at water, couldn’t drink water, could not be around water. Before that, she’d always painted these New England landscapes filled with water. And after that, she spent most of her time in the desert, and she never painted water. 

I was obsessed with this elemental fear which should be so outside of you — water should just be water and fire should just be fire. It is so outside of you that it’s like being afraid of air or food. It’s kind of an insane thing to be afraid of because they’re elemental. I think that everybody really responds to them. I could only sort of feel it bodily, like what would it mean to be afraid of water? I’m somebody who really loves water. I love swimming. I swim all the time, and I find it really hard to be away from water.

To some extent, I am very interested in what water and fire do as twinned elements and what they represent in writing. There’s a lot about water and fire in The Inland Sea as well. These particular landscapes can flood and there can be a lack of water as well. There’s always an awareness of water and fire as well. It’s burning in Los Angeles right now. It’s burning in Australia right now. 

I think that elemental twinning is there for all sorts of reasons and I could try to tell you I had really precise reasons for why I put them in there. But I think that I feel both of those things strongly in my own body and in my own mind and they will probably be in everything that I write. For me, the world is structured by those two things, by water and fire. 

CD: At the top of our conversation, you talked about how there’s not really a lot of climate change in realist fiction. It doesn’t necessarily deal with it. I feel like there’s a lot of speculative fiction about it. I’ve also noticed that absence conspicuously in art and media and everything around the pandemic. It’s just not there. Everything is set in 2019 for no particular reason. Do you think we’ll start to move in a more realist direction with these topics in art as it becomes more present [in people’s daily lives]? 

MW: I hope so. This was one of the things that, when I was writing The Inland Sea, really started to annoy me. Climate change was something that was in speculative fiction, therefore it was always about something that happened in the future. Then in literary fiction, it wasn’t there. I love speculative fiction, and I love a lot of sci fi writers, and I love Octavia Butler, and they’re the progenitors of climate change writing, but that’s not the kind of writing that I’m interested in doing. 

So it started to really frustrate me and then I started to see that there are literary books that can be reread as climate change novels that were not initially read as climate change novels from the 90s. I think The Rings of Saturn by Sebald is a really great climate change book. And it was a book that I was rereading a lot while I was writing this book. 

I do think that there is more and more climate change threaded through [fiction]. I’m not telling every writer that they need to write about climate change. That would be boring. I just find it odd that people writing about what it’s like to be alive right now will not even mention it. It’s so deeply threaded through what it’s like to be alive and if you don’t even mention it, you’re not really being honest, you’re not doing a good representation of your times. 

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