MixedSydney Review of Books (AUS)For all its evocative local textures, Watts’ novel shares much of its literary DNA with a North American tradition of melancholic summer novels in which women who fall afoul of gendered hypocrisies feel the pull of their bodies to blood, their minds to disintegration ... The myth of Cassandra hovers portentously over the novel, which links a maddening political failure to heed the projections of climate science to the plight of women cursed never to be believed ... Watts is liberal with metaphor, and her penchant for figurative responses to material power disparities leads the reader into slippery terrain. Invoking the colonial analogue of earth and women’s bodies implicit in terra incognita, her ecofeminist critique of the trope shades into provocative redeployment of it ... Watts appears to sidestep her white narrator’s implication in the colonial project, as though her voluntary abdication of agency absolves her of any responsibility at all ... Frustrating any smug indictment of her novel, as Watts charts her young narrator’s twenty-first century voyage out, she mounts a self-reflexive engagement with the cringe, and the contemporary conditions that inflame it: from our nation’s brash strong man politics and grossly negligent climate policy to an indifference, bordering on hostility, to the arts. This last, Watts handles heavy-handedly ... Though Watts’ ambitions are admirable, her election of a white, ‘titian’ haired narrator to the role of unheeded prophet encapsulates the novel’s limitations. The narration is executed with the confidence of an A student, who is across the issues and therefore absolved from further scrutiny ... The Inland Sea is an omnivorous, heady debut dense with paradox and provocation. With no pretensions to lighting the way out of our current mess, Watts guides us into the thicket.
