Death Valley

This is my first encounter with Melissa Broder. I really want to read The Pisces, but it wasn't available yet, so I put it on hold and opted for this one instead. I love surrealism, magical realism, unlikable characters, and the desert, so I figured I'd love this. It was a decent read, but it fell short of my expectations.

There are a few things to like about Death Valley: the MC/protagonist is snarky and self-aware and kind of an asshole - a winning combination in my opinion. Her first-person narration didn't try to make excuses for her dysfunction. Or her weird habit of talking to herself and inanimate objects. All good stuff. The setting is my favorite part of this book. Broder captures the arid, lackadaisical-until-it-tries-to-kill-you vibe of the desert, and the quirkiness of the people who usually inhabit it.

The plot revolves around a woman writer who goes to the desert to decompress and 'get out of L.A.' as her father recovers in the ICU. She's also dealing with a chronically ill husband and a neurotic mother, which she reflects upon at length with candor. While she's in Death Valley, she stays at a Best Western - a hotel chain that I can only assume paid to have itself promoted in this novel because it serves no real purpose (aside from being a mid hotel where she's staying), considering how often it's named in throughout the book. Before she leaves Death Valley, the woman takes one more hike to try to find a giant cactus she'd seen previously, and ends up getting lost in the desert. She survives, finds the cactus, and then has a strange, surreal encounter with it or, rather, in it.

There is so much potential in this plot, but I'm sorry to say it didn't quite get there. The characters felt two-dimensional, and the psychedelic aspect of her encounter with the cactus felt more like a weird dream than the life-altering experience it's meant to be.

There are some touching reflections on the process of death and dying, as well as poignant narration around familial and romantic relationships. I just didn't care that much about any of the characters and found the main character emotionally flat and self-absorbed - and not in the good, existential crisis kind of way. I wanted to like her, but she was kind of a drag.

Anyway, it was a decent read and I'm not sorry I read it. The good news is that The Pisces came up right after I finished this, so I'm giving Broder's writing another chance. I've heard good things about her novels, and I really want to love them.

Thanks so much to the publisher for providing me an advanced reader copy of this book.

Having not read anything by the author before, I wasn't sure what to expect. But I was really happy to find that Death Valley worked really well for me. We follow our unnamed protagonist, an author, in the throes of grief as her father is in the hospital doing poorly. She deals with days of care taking and medical emergencies that she can't seem to escape because her husband also deals with chronic illness. She decides to take a brief retreat to the desert, staying at a prototypical yet eccentric Best Western (a personal favorite of myself as well), where she's recommended a local hiking trail through the desert. On these hikes she comes face to face with physical manifestations of her grief, phantom cacti, children, and personified rocks. And also she gets lost.

This was funny. Like FUNNY funny. The way the author paints her as always on the cusp of a mental breakdown, the LA-esque pseudo mysticisms and therapy talk to deal with grief, the Jewish mother we all know, the subreddits and comments, the weirdly specific desk workers at the Best Western, and even the vulnerable insecurities that come with caring for a dying loved one -- it all came together in a beautiful mural of sadness and comedy. Instead of focusing on the tedious reality of caring for a dying parent, this book perfectly captured the emotions in a surreal way. I particularly loved the dichotomy of the condition of the father and the husband that surfaces several times, though I wish it were explored a bit further. I think there can be a lot to say when comparing age related death to chronic illness.

I do think the first half of this was a bit stronger than the second half. There's more narrative progression in the first half, with the second half being more introspective and surface level philosophical. I do think a dive into the introspective was necessary as way to fully realize the protagonist's fall into manic grief, but I was left wanting a bit more depth to it. Also, the narrator is an author fleshing our her next book about a woman dealing with the death of her father and the illness of her husband -- I thought it was a bit too on-the-nose meta and the plot point didn't really pan out in any meaningful way. It distracted more than it served.

How to recommend this, hmm. If you need a lighthearted exploration of grief, you'll like this. If you like funny, topical books you'll like this. If you like reddit humor, as in literally reading comments from reddit, you'll like this. If you're looking for a rigid narrative, you won't like this. If you want a more serious, or deep exploration of grief, you won't like this. If you think millennial humor is cringe, you won't like this. But I did!