They drove through the skull of time. Inside the skull, the penetrating light of experiments shone. The skull curved and inside it, dead cows lay with skin hanging. The wool of sheep clung to the wet parts of the skull, floating teeth attached to bone and ate it away, exposing the wire nerves. The world's sand had been heated to glass. They drove along the glass jaw, the flashing nerve highway. This is Nevada, the atomic state.The blurb for Death Valley refers to the book's style as “hallucinogenic realism”, and as with that opening quote I selected, you're either going to like it or not. As for me, I can't really say that I liked the style – I was often bored and confused – and I was a little turned off by the six degrees of anti-Americanism – at which no one excels like the Canadian intelligentsia – but I do totally respect the literary effort put forth by author Susan Perly; as a war correspondent herself, she has indeed created art (which is always subjective) out of her singular experiences and perspective. I am pleased that this book's appearance on the Giller Prize's longlist this year led me to picking it up, yet I am unsurprised that it didn't become a finalist.
Set in the waning days of 2006, Death Valley recounts a treacherous road trip by a cast of related characters: Vivienne “Baby” Pink is a celebrated photojournalist, under a deadline to shoot some portraits for her next book on soon-to-be-deployed American soldiers; Johnny “Jojo” Coma is her husband, a famous novelist; Val Gold is a government spook, and the long time best friend and roommate of Vivienne and Johnny; Danny Coma (Johnny's brother) is a former diplomat, now a lunatic in a bird suit on the Vegas Strip; and Andy “San Diego” is the young soldier Vivienne chooses to photograph who unwittingly gets tied up in a love triangle as old as the others' friendship. As the characters explore the desert and dunes outside Vegas, the landscape and history of the area allow them to cover the controversial story of 20th century America.
Most prominent in this history are the nuclear bomb tests that took place in the area, and so many connections web out from these tests to other events that it makes the brain spin: ie., this is from where the city of Los Angeles first stole their water, making a wasteland of a former agricultural zone ---> the H bomb was tested here that would be used on Nagasaki and Hiroshima ---> Japanese-American residents of LA were interred in camps in the ghost towns LA created ---> Ansel Adams visited the internment camps and climbed the guard towers to take iconic pictures of the dunes ---> nuclear fallout from the tests blows as far east as New Jersey and the Kodak film factories, causing clouding on the film and affecting photographers. While there are several webs like this, the biggest connection is made between the nuclear tests and Hollywood movies – and while I did appreciate the image of those mannequin-filled test homes being razed by blastwaves (and especially because these facades recall Hollywood sets), this book is filled with constant references to old movies that felt overdone and boring (and, yes, I get that there's irony in all the big golden age stars apparently getting cancer from filming in the Nevada desert – John Wayne played a cowboy dying of cancer in The Shootist...while he was actually dying of cancer from playing cowboys! – but there were just too many movies referenced).
Even when talking about the diplomatic corps (another big facade, apparently, masking a toxic core), Perly compares the enthusiasm of the first embassies (Benjamin Franklin in Paris, eager to introduce a new nation) to the bloated bureaucracy of the modern (the new US embassy in Baghdad covers a square mile, with 15 000 staff, half of that security), and ties in the cinematic with further webs of connection:
Ben Franklin was not in Paris anymore, and neither was Marlon Brando in Indochine in The Ugly American. Ben Franklin was no longer living in the suburb of Passy, and neither was Marlon Brando, who rented a flat in Passy in The Last Tango in Paris.In another example, Danny Coma was in Spain during Operation Broken Arrow – which saw a bunch of US nuclear warheads accidentally dropped off the coast of that country – and after having written about Picasso and Franco and Guernica, Basque bombings, and Spanish ties to 9/11, Perly points out that the area of Spanish desert presumably most affected by the lost warheads was where Sergio Leone liked to film his spaghetti westerns; it's just all so laboured. Also laboured was the language in this book (more facades?):
Daniel Coma had twisted his love of language to make meeting about nuclear disarmament, and using the abstract words of meeting at the top levels, a safe thing to touch, to remove the harm from the living by speaking in dead words, to name things best named clearly, best because best for the soul of nations, and to do harm, by naming them in the worst possible way, however on the other hand, named in obfuscation and reification and nuclear capabilities, and here they were.Huh? Vivienne is the main character of Death Valley, and she's always trying to capture truth, while being aware that her own point-of-view is present in every photograph. (This is also true for Johnny in his novels, and by extension, true for Perly herself.) Because Vivienne's career covers everything from Vietnam to the second Iraq War, she has much to say about America on the world stage. And everything she has to say is presented against this backdrop of “hallucinogenic realism” (so far in this review, I have straightened out many crooked lines to make these connections), and as we follow her down the rabbithole (literally: Alice and the White Rabbit appear alongside a hookah-smoking caterpillar), it's hard as a reader to understand why it must all be so opaque (and, yes, I get that Vivienne feels “concussed” from covering war zones; but was she really put in the path of a modern nuclear test by shadowy government officials, or is this whole road trip a fantasy?)
Along the way, there were some lovely bits of writing that I thought captures what Perly was trying to say:
Where there is no water, Earth's creatures will feel the former riverine life, how we miss our gills, our scales fluorescent magnificent. How things own us when we own things, how winter douses the light to let us rest in our emotions.But more often, Perly came right out with unadorned opinion:
Unknowing pale orange mutant grasses grew into late afternoon. Masses of soft grey-blue blew up and down. Here was the forensic evidence of poison. America conquered itself, experimented on itself, ravaged its own land, bombed its own western desert back to the Stone Age. America weaponized its own air, which for years concussed its citizens. The land was too big, the space was too large, America's house was supersized, America busyworked into ruin, calling it love of country.So there it is: I've told all about this book without really telling what it's about. There is much to admire in Death Valley, and while it feels like it ought to be read, I don't know to whom I would recommend it (which feels like the point of having it on a literary longlist).
The 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Andrew Battershill : Pillow
David Bergen : Stranger
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Kathy Page : The Two of Us
Susan Perly : Death Valley
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush
Steven Price : By Gaslight
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People
*Won by Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Not really a surprise, but this is how I ranked the shortlist, entirely according to my own enjoyment level with the reading experience:
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People