CULTURE CLUB
Book Club CAMBRIDGE EDITION Cosy up in the cool weather with this month’s most riveting reads, including tales of grief, survival and heartwarming discovery
WORDS BY CHARLOTTE GRIFFITHS
Death Valley: A Novel BY MELISSA BRODER
Maintaining family relationships is hard work. Surviving in the desert is harder – but only just. This surrealist, darkly funny novel sets the mental challenge of grief against the sun-bleached, water- parched landscape of California’s Death Valley: the hottest place on earth. Our unnamed narrator, a 40-something writer, is struggling. Her husband is chronically unwell with a flu-like illness, and five months ago her father was critically injured in a car accident in Los Angeles. He now lies in intensive care, leaving the narrator and her family stranded between worlds. Her father occasionally wakes for brief periods of time, only to fall back into unconsciousness, and the most recent round of these events have seen her run to the desert to escape the cycle and try to work on her stalled novel. She checks into a Best Western hotel just south of Death Valley, desperate to make progress on the book – and by extension, on herself. After arriving, she receives a text from her mother: her father is awake again, but she should not come back. Our narrator calls to find out about her father’s health, but her mother swiftly moves the conversation to the apparent necessity of returning multiple pairs of sweatpants, batting away any of her attempts to connect on a deeper, more emotional level. Her mother is handling the crisis by staying busy and focusing on logistics, while our narrator,
bewildered by her mother’s obsession with minutiae, is completely paralysed by the ebb and flow of her emotions. What exactly does it mean to handle something well? Stricken by guilt for not being at her father’s bedside and consumed by self-loathing for finding her husband’s illness annoying, the narrator takes a suggestion from the hotel receptionist and goes for a hike in the desert. She starts off on the trail while texting her mother, who has messaged to say the sweatpants have finally been returned and that she should be sure to take water on her hike. She hasn’t, but lies about it to her mother. Our narrator doesn’t quite know why she does this. Annoyance makes her put her phone away, determined to connect with the experience of the natural world more fully – which is when she first spots the improbably enormous cactus that will become the scene of her unravelling – and her awakening. This moving book poses questions about the everyday and the exceptional – as well as the way in which life itself can be both at once. It’s incredible that we are here at all, and yet losing someone important still feels like an otherworldly, impossible experience. We might feel in control of events, and yet all it takes to completely upend our lives is a moment in which we miss a turning, stumble off-trail and slip into another reality.
DESERTED Melissa Broder’s story of grief transforms into a journey of awakening This moving book asks questions about the everyday, the exceptional and the way life is both at once
20 OCTOBER 2023 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK
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