Book Review: Death Valley by Melissa Broder
Tina Nouri-Mahdavi ‘26
Photo credit: Ysabella Beatriz Chiongbian Punzalan ‘24
★★★★☆
Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and Milk-Fed, wants us to inhabit and embrace a world where delusion and reality intermingle and become indiscernible in her new novel, Death Valley.
Set in the novel’s punny namesake, the unnamed protagonist of the story escapes her ICU-ridden father and her husband’s worsening chronic illness to the safe haven of the barren desert’s Best Western to write her upcoming novel. It is in this poor-quality shelter that she meets employees that intrigue her in ways no one else would see, and it is those employees’ suggestions that lead her to a hiking trail where she comes across a giant, magical cactus. The giant cactus is an asylum for both her greatest wishes and everything she was attempting to escape.
The voice Broder constructs in the protagonist is one that is typical of her other novels: relatable, funnys and depressingly real and human in ways that most of us try to shield from an audience of any kind. She is Reddit-obsessed, horny, and delusional in more ways than one. Her observations, compulsions, and beliefs create a palpable presence in the novel, making her character alive and vibrant, known and raw to the readers within the first few pages.
It is necessary, really, for our narrator to be so easily read and digested, for most of the novel takes place at a time of her solitude, and thus almost wholly in her mind. Broder fully understands the implications of an arid desert as a removed escape from the populated world of Los Angeles and mirrors the narrative of the novel on this system of separation. The narrator’s entire life exists in Los Angeles, as do most of the conflicts that subsume her mind for the entirety of the book. It is in Los Angeles where a majority of the underlying tensions of the plot reside. Yet the more urgent and relevant tensions of the book are in this distant realm of the desert through the vessel of only the narrator’s mind and, at times, her cell phone.
It is because of this unexpected yet inventive construction that allows our narrator to shine and resolve her problems whilst in little contact with the conflicts themselves. She is technically alone and must cope with that which afflicts her, yet she is never truly alone for too many pages or chapters. Rather, Broder insists on accompanying the protagonist with figments of her own imagination, animating the inanimate in order to cope with the loneliness that comes with the trouble that she believed to leave behind in LA. While our narrator goes on what would typically be believed to be a “reflective” and “transformative” solitary experience in the desolate desert, she is never alone. She is joined by the voices and personalities she creates for rocks and rabbits, recollections of past Reddit posts she has consumed, and the haunting mirages of the people in her life that she both loves and resents the most. The entire novel seems to take place within the narrator’s imagination, magical cacti and imaginary friends, yet those imaginings are rooted in the very real issues of her life. The voice in her head, and the voices and personalities she ascribes to inanimate objects, are coping mechanisms to satisfy her dissatisfaction with reality, the loneliness she feels so deeply that it is necessary to spawn her own solution.
It is because of the woven realms of imagination and reality that the novel, and Broder, want us to be unclear on what is reality and what is delusion. Yet they also want us to understand that there is not much of a difference between them at all. Broder is trying to convey that our realities are constructed by our own minds and hands, purely projections of our desires and fears. Whether we choose to inhabit the reality of illness and desolation or the reality of giant, welcoming cacti is up to us and our ability to acknowledge our so-called delusions.
There is so much action and plot in the life that our unnamed narrator left behind, and yet Broder chooses to place us in this peripheral realm of existence with strangers and a barren desert where events do take place but almost entirely in the mind. By taking us out of the world of Los Angeles, a city where all of the narrator’s sources of fear and dread lie, Broder wants us to know that an escape to a seemingly hollow place does not ease our worries. What we think to be peace, whether in a location or in the mind, contains horrors beyond our knowledge. Broder warns us that our mind can sometimes be a more terrifying place than that which our greatest external conflicts lie whilst also being our greatest tool and source of elation.
Yet it feels as if, at the end of the novel, Broder loses sight of all that makes the narrator and her situation so compelling. The ending feels safe and uneventful, uncharacteristic of the protagonist and all the ways in which she became known to us within the few hundred pages of the novel. She finds herself in an impossible situation, and thus so does Broder, and yet both Broder and the narrator find a way out that dismantles everything that has been built in the pages before. The ending is symbolic in many ways of the narrator’s new embrace towards home, both Los Angeles and the people in it, yet it deprives her of coming to that place, both physically and emotionally, of her own volition.
The ending does not diminish Broder’s savvy and charming prose, the narrator’s magnetism, or the mere enjoyment of the novel as a good read. Death Valley is a place where we can turn to in order to escape our own troubles and adopt those of the exceedingly relatable and enthralling narrative as our own instead.
This is an ongoing column. Read Tina’s first review on In the Kitchen, Essays on Food and Life here.