, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year, Madeleine Watts' stunning debut novel, is a book about emergencies both big-climate change-and small-regrettable romantic hookups, clumsy IUD insertions. The Inland Sea doesn’t assert the equivalence of climate catastrophe and the guy who doesn’t call, but allows them to exist in concert. A dizzying account of anxiety in this tale of crises both intimate and global. It plays with the idea that understanding ecological and personal catastrophes through each other is something cringey and then challenges that cringe’s gendered stakes.

Watts’s novel is best read as a call to start seeing beyond finite empathy economies. Here are some commonly seen marine mammals. While the woman/nature trope as a kind of self-flagellating youthful hubris is operative here, mostly I think the comparisons are up to something earnest. Oxley never found it, but he never ceased to believe it was out there. This means it also resists unitary readings. The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts 14.99 Add to basket Buy From In the early 19th century, British explorer John Oxley traversed the then-unknown wilderness of central Australia in search of water. But the novel, as I mentioned earlier, resists neat generic containment. One answer might be that The Inland Sea rehearses these tropes with a certain amount of ironic distance.

The moments of sexual violence in The Inland Sea, when taken together with the historical feminization of terra incognita and the narrator’s implicit parallels between personal and climatalogical disaster, sit in uncomfortable proximity to those old tropes. This is a symbolic equation so well established that the feminist critique of the trope has become its own scholarly cliché. This gendered squeezing is an instance of that classic figurative illusion where inhabited lands become female, empty, inert.

The narrator’s personal analogies between land and self are often left implicit. The Inland Sea joins recent efforts like Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Jenny Offill’s Weather. Over the course of the twenty-first century, global sea levels are projected to rise between about 2 and 7 feet, and possibly more.