Immediately the Mojave starts working its miracles on this sad, horny woman who feels afraid of the sky, judged by the moon and “cosmically needy.” She soon observes that, “wandering around in the desert, there’s no need to play hard to get with God.” When she shines her love light on two perfectly drawn employees of a Best Western, they in turn point her to a mysterious hiking trail. Buddhists tell the parable of the second arrow of suffering, “the feeling about the feeling,” as the Silver Jews put it. In prose of unparalleled style and seemingly effortless bravery, Broder’s narrator shoots an entire quiver of emotional arrows into herself and then, like Frida Kahlo’s little deer, bounds into the wilderness, heart open, wounds weeping, no hat, not enough water.
Despite fearing herself and her novel “too earthbound,” she digs in, getting as earthy as Mary Austin or Ana Mendieta by climbing into a magical Saguaro cactus. Here Broder’s riotously original ecosexual surrealism performs an uncanny transubstantiation, the novel becoming a survival adventure that couldn’t have been better written by Jack London himself. Broder’s euphoric plotting and winning characters combine with a gift for desert description (that pink light creeping out into infinity) reminiscent of Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” I tried to ration this book but guzzled.
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. If we can learn, as Broder all but implores, to worship a land that would impale the sentimental, leaf-stroking impulse of the pastoral, then maybe we can love the whole world as it deserves to be loved. Given that the protagonist meets God in the Mojave, what to make of the fact that many of the places that awaken us to the world’s astonishments are slated for sacrifice?
Much of Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve are, as of this writing, inaccessible after flooding from Tropical Storm Hilary. In 2020 a fire burned over 43,000 acres of Cima Dome, one of the largest Joshua tree forests in the world. This summer, another fire more than doubled that carnage. Meanwhile “green” capitalists are exploiting the climate emergency by grabbing unbroken, formerly public, pilgrimage-worthy expanses of the Mojave and the Great Basin for water-intensive mines, geothermal plants at biodiverse springs and poorly sited industrial solar arrays on critical tortoise habitats.
