Recommend: No
Reading on holidays is undeniably the best place to read. It’s a drug. Reading on holidays has lead me to almost quit my job twice, such is the sweet addiction of turning a page without the underlying caustic stress of the trading floor pumping through me after hours. Thirty pages into Death Valley, it became clear that I wasn’t to quit any time soon. This book sucked.
I devoured Broder’s earlier food-obsessed book Hot Milk. And she also wrote one where the protagonist fucks a mermaid (somehow this fell flat). Death Valley will be my final Broder, barring some truly superb marketing from her PR team.
Death Valley is poorly written. It is a Miranda July fan fiction. The narrator’s two most important people in her life are disabled by health to varying degrees. Her father is convalescing in hospital after some accident. Her husband has chronic pain and fatigue, suffering from a deliberately unnamed malaise. The breakdown in male authority has impacted her so much she’s gone on an excursion to the Californian dessert ‘to get away from it all’. What follows is a hallucinogenic farce that is neither funny nor touching.
The plot is bland. What’s worse is the writing. If I had to isolate one stylistic touch that sends shivers down my back, it would be the exploitation of parentheses. She (over)uses them to affect a conversational prose, as you meant to be front and centre in the narrator’s delusions. But given Broder’s lack of talent in constructing tension in the plot, the end result is akin to some friend of a friend rabbiting on and on about the minutiae of their life. Only I can’t walk away – I paid $35 to hear this drivel. It is truly incredible how many parentheses Broder shoves into each page. On one page alone there are four separate pairs. It really must be read to be believed. It edges on a parody of grammatical form.
If you tortured me further and forced me to decide on my second most-hated element of Death Valley, I wouldn’t be able to go past the distasteful filler slabs of reddit posts wedged into the novel.
Broder is possible of writing a really good book (Hot Milk). Maybe this is what it is like for a runway model to hit the nightly ice-creams and kick up her feet and model for Target. I can hear the sigh of tightly wound ambition being released and a new, easier way of living being adapted. Just hit the keyboard for 300 pages. Make the font nice and large. Chat to the reader. Booktok. Take your pay check. Chill out. Fine. Do that Broder. Write a book completely devoid of purpose. But have the decency to give me some signal that this will be an utter waste of my holiday reading. At the very least you could have whacked a “Reese Witherspoon recommends” stamp on there.
Leave a Reply