Incandescent ... Ecstatically awake to the world’s astonishments ... If I have a gripe, it’s that Joshua trees don’t have 'leaves,' a word Broder uses twice. Spikes, spears, daggers, tines, needles — but, by my code, never leaves. Maybe that’s trifling, maybe not ... A triumph, a ribald prayer for sensuality and grace in the face of profound loss, a hilarious revolt against the aggressive godlessness, dehumanization and fear plaguing our time.
Broder turns to a grimmer topic — grief. But her disarming and whimsical style remains intact ... Broder’s own gift is for scenes and dialogue that are so natural — in that they reflect the ridiculousness and surrealism of real life — that they tip over into the uncanny. She is also very funny ... Never, ever boring.
Most thoughts, feelings and experiences are modified, analyzed or sourced for wry riffs. Sentences reaching for the sublime end in bathos. It’s a smart choice for an anxious narrator, one who is very associative and very online ... Broder is a comedic writer, a poet averse to stale language and an online personality tirelessly manning a churn of new quips on the familiar subject of sadness.
Our heroine has a lot to experience over the course of Death Valley. Time and time again, she finds herself in the delightful and surreal situations that are characteristic of Broder’s oeuvre ... Broder keeps readers grounded in the more mundane details of the narrator’s trip ... The use of the desert itself as a metaphor for grief is particularly effective ... Some readers may find the narrator’s constant preoccupation with her own thoughts and feelings, and the New Age-Instagram-infographic type jargon used to render it, somewhat grating. However, this critic is not that reader ... A riotous victory. Somehow, Broder has illuminated a tale of grief and loss with her characteristic wit and insight. The result is as dazzlingly brilliant as a desert sunset.
Broder employs every tool in her arsenal to propel Death Valley forward and sustain momentum, but there are chapters when the novel strains under the weight of suspended disbelief. The insight and sharp humour lose some of their luminosity and power in the blurred landscape – which may be the point ... Broder has the advantage of exploring the extremities of the heart and psyche – love, fear, anxiety, addiction, death – and holding them up as a mirror. She is smart enough to give us a protagonist who is more hopeful than helpless, and engaging enough to keep readers wondering what she will encounter next.
Death Valley is not a wan little husk of autofiction; Broder’s mind is too weird for that ... It’s unclear how much of what happens out in the desert is real, at least within the world of the novel. But either way, in line with Broder’s previous work, the true substance of Death Valley is the psychological portrait of a woman trying to come to terms with the terrifying co-existence of life and death. There are, as promised, revelations about love too. If you’re the kind of reader who spends a lot of time in your head—rather than, say, keeping track of your surroundings—you might feel you’ve met a kindred spirit.
Brings on laughs and a lump in the throat, making it all look easy, as her poetic prose and well-honed pages zoom by and her narrator struggles to be in an impossible here.
While the narrative thrust of the story is determined by its first-person narrator’s outward wanderings, it is what’s going on inside her heart and soul that delivers the real, satisfying emotional punch. To pull that punch off takes prose that’s both memorable and relatable, as well as a narrator with an inner life that is fulfilling both thematically and narratively. That Death Valley manages this is enough to make it a thoroughly engrossing literary achievement—even before factoring in Broder’s humor, gift for linguistic flourishes and command of character.
his is not a subtle book—the protagonist is very literally walking in the valley of the shadow of death—but it’s as wise in its way as any spiritualism about vision quests or finding enlightenment. A 100 percent Broder take on grief and empathy: embodied but cerebral, hilarious but heart-wrenching.
