Elegy, Southwest
By Madeleine Watts
- ISBN: 9781761153136
Reviewed by NINA CULLEY
Elegy, Southwest (2025), winner of the 2026 ALS Gold Medal, arrives as further confirmation of Madeleine Watts’s standing as one of Australia’s most compelling and inventive contemporary novelists. Following The Inland Sea (2020), shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, it extends Watts’ ongoing interest in the entanglement of personal grief and ecological collapse, while pushing more directly into the political and environmental questions that have been preoccupying her work for some time. These are also the questions Eloise, the novel’s protagonist, is wrestling with as she and her husband, Lewis, travel through the American Southwest, where she’s researching a dissertation driven by an obsession with the dwindling flow of the Colorado River.
Watts situates their journey within a narrow window: between California’s Camp and Thomas Fires and Australia’s own Black Summer bushfires, in that uneasy interregnum before the pandemic, when Greta Thunberg’s activism had intensified public climate consciousness. Against that backdrop, the novel unfolds in retrospect, filtered through Eloise’s memories of the journey and of Lewis’s decline and eventual disappearance – a truth Watts circles rather than confronts directly, making its eventual revelation all the more disorienting. From this retrospective distance, Eloise laments the things she never told her husband: her pregnancy, and then her miscarriage.
That mournful, searching quality finds its most striking expression in Watts’s decision to address Lewis in the second person. It’s one of the scarcest and most contested points of view in fiction, one that creative writing workshops tend to tut at and many novels avoid altogether. The handful that’ve pulled it off, like Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984), naturally remain exceptions, since “you” can so easily veer into gimmickry. Watts’s gamble works, however, because her “you” is not just stylistic but the only grammatical space capable of holding this grief: a way of keeping Lewis present in a book defined by his absence. It also makes it easier to accept that the secondary characters – Lewis’s therapist Mariana, his father and brother – remain loosely drawn, because fuller rendering of the people around them would dilute the novel’s central tension: the intimacy (and co-dependence) of the pair set against a paradoxical lack of communication.
Lewis, who works for an art foundation, has his own task: checking in on Kenneth, the surviving partner of the recently deceased artist Lawrence Greco, and assessing the completion of Greco’s desert installation, Negative Capability. The title of Greco’s installation borrows from Keats’s idea of an artist sitting in uncertainties, resisting frameworks, and valuing beauty over the pursuit of objective fact. Keats arrived at this idea after losing most of his family to tuberculosis before dying from the disease himself at twenty-five – grief, after all, is the original unexplainable thing.
It’s a bold gesture on Watts’s part to reach for something so squarely Keatsian and make it feel current rather than archaic. The poet’s own formulation of beauty over fact – “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” – is the negative capability Eloise can, and can’t, manage: she stews in the beauty of the landscape, but also reaches for fact, research, control, certain that if she reads enough, she’ll be prepared. When Lewis’s mother gets sick, for example, she studies what she calls “the canon of death” (Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Kate Zambreno, and, of course, WebMD), hoping that knowledge might offer some comfort: “As though by studying the canon of death I would be able to anticipate the future, prepare a plan, and take control of the outcome. I was reading for you, for when you fell apart,” (p. 50). Lewis, by contrast, is more internal and embodied, clinging to the gifts his mother left him – headphones, a Nintendo – and retreating into meditation, bodywork, and an increasing reliance on weed.
Watts leaves little unaccounted for, with each formal and narrative choice carefully calibrated to the novel’s larger concerns. The density of Eloise’s – and Watts’ by extension – theoretical and intellectual framing is not just a feature of her characterisation, but a reflection of the way she processes her experiences. During her own miscarriage, for instance, Eloise recounts a story about Georgia O’Keeffe to her mentor, Camila, revealing her tendency to reach for other people’s stories – like O’Keeffe – as a way of making sense of her own. This habit becomes both a coping mechanism and a structural reflection of the novel’s broader tensions: Watts explores the desire to use knowledge, art, and language as a way of making sense of an increasingly uncertain world, while also acknowledging the limits of those tools when confronted with grief and environmental loss.
The novel returns to this tension as Eloise considers Elizabeth Bishop’s unfinished poem, Aubade and Elegy, which began after her lover Lota de Macedo Soares took her own life. Like Watts’s novel, the poem was written in the second person, with the word “you” struck out. Eloise asks who is erased in that struck-out word: “Was it the beloved? Or was it the poor husk of the person left behind, rendered suddenly second person?” (p. 105). Eloise’s question implies that the novel’s use of the second person does more than address Lewis – it also enacts her estrangement from herself, suggesting that grief can erase the identity left behind as well as the person who has gone.
This sense of doubling – or shadowing – runs throughout the novel; another way Watts highlights the interplay between intimacy and distance in Eloise and Lewis’s relationship. O’Keeffe’s recovery mirrors the pair’s own time in the desert and their twin obsessions with water’s abundance and recession; Eloise’s miscarriage, endured alone at home, rhymes with Lewis dispersing his grief alone in that same landscape. The domesticity of Kenneth and Lawrence echoes that of Eloise and Lewis. The Colorado River itself circles back when Eloise observes that it was “nice until it got so toxic. And now it’s disappearing” (p. 58). It’s a sentence that could be describing almost anything in the novel: a relationship, a person, a world.
*
Climate fiction (or cli-fi), despite its growing presence in literary spaces, is still often viewed as overly didactic or apocalyptic. Watts resists both expectations and is instead more interested in the quieter, cumulative ways climate change reshapes landscapes, memories, and everyday life. In an interview, she noted that climate change is “global but also manifests locally,” arguing that writers can either see this as a challenge or “use [it] as structural possibilities and innovate [their] form to respond to them.”(1) Elegy, Southwest embraces the latter approach, using form and language to explore not only environmental loss but also the political systems that enable it, from government policy to extractive capitalism. Her prose is both melancholic and probing, tracing the quiet, cumulative effects of climate change: drying earth, dwindling water supplies and the rotting fish of the Salton Sea. For anyone who lived through the Australian drought, myself included, or who has watched the American Southwest’s rivers literally disappear, these passages will feel sadly familiar. Even the idea of a mall fountain spurting water becomes something Eloise can’t remember ever seeing, which is how most of us are now experiencing climate change – a detail likely to turn up in more and more novels as it becomes harder to ignore in real life: cracked earth along the Appalachian trail, shorter gardening seasons, the decline of butterflies, as everyday Americans described in a recent Guardian article. (2)
This sense of solastalgia, alongside a landscape juxtaposed as ruined and beautiful, made me think of the tradition of the Australian writer abroad – Patrick White, Christina Stead – for whom the expatriate condition sharpens both the adopted landscape and the longing for home. Eloise being Australian gives her an outsider’s eye on the Southwest and its mythology: Coachella, weed pens, palm trees, the long Lynchian highways, punctuated by a domestic rhythm of date shakes in diners, checking in and out of Airbnbs, endless tidying and pottering. “It’s the America you are singing about in all the songs. I was interested in exploring this Americana from an outsider perspective.”(3) That vantage allows her to map the landscape’s damage in ways that are never abstract but visceral, intimate and always rooted in place.
Despite moments of warmth – small human flashes, or, in the spirit of the book, glimmers over water – Elegy, Southwest is not a particularly hopeful read. By the end, we’re left searching and haunted alongside Eloise, perhaps because Watts is too wise, or too pragmatic, a writer to offer us any answers. Instead, she treats both loss and climate change critically and attentively, and it’s this patience, this willingness to linger within beauty (or ruin) rather than push towards resolution or revelation, that gives the novel its distinctive force.
Notes
1. Courage, Ariel. “Writer Madeleine Watts on Balancing Growth and Guarding Against Burnout.” The Creative Independent, 6 Mar. 2025, www.thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-madeleine-watts-on-balancing-growth-and-guarding-against-burnout/
2. Canon, Gabrielle. “How the Climate Crisis Showed Up in Americans’ Lives This Year: ‘The Shift Has Been Swift and Stark’.” The Guardian, 31 Dec. 2025, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/31/climate-crisis-guardian-readers.
3. Cain, Sian. “Madeleine Watts: ‘Climate Change Should Be in Everyone’s Writing Right Now’.” The Guardian, 3 Mar. 2025, www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/03/madeleine-watts-climate-change-should-be-in-everyones-writing-right-now
NINA CULLEY is a Thai-Welsh writer and critic based in Naarm. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Aniko Press, Mascara Review, and more. As a theatre, arts, and literary critic, her work is regularly published in Time Out, Limelight, and ArtsHub. In 2024, she was named one of Mascara’s Emerging Critics, and she is a 2025 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Nina previously worked as Editorial Assistant at Kill Your Darlings.