The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest by Ellen Meloy
226 pages
Published 1999
Read from March 29 to April 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The "cheater" here is Meloy's "lover," the slickrock terrain of southeastern Utah, a land she feels she knows intimately until its history of uranium mining and its contributions to nuclear proliferation spin her out into a malaise of soul and geography. Although often repeated, this spiritual crisis never feels real to me -- likely because I was eight years old when the USSR split, and never felt the dread of nuclear annihilation except in childish mimicry. The central thesis -- linking the mathematical violence of the nuclear age with the desert geography she thought she knew so well -- is interesting and unique, but Meloy seems content to merely link the concepts, and doesn't develop them beyond descriptions of her own nausea and amorphous dread. Meloy's prose is, as usual, evocative and sinuous, approaching description from unexpected but brilliantly idiosyncratic angles, but the weakness (as I perceived it) of the central thesis reduces the book's punch.
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