Bitter Water Opera (Graywolf Press, 2024), the debut novel by the American writer Nicolette Polek, begins with the invocation of a muse. Gia, the narrator, is recently single and on leave from the film studies department where she teaches. Insomnia and depression weigh on her, petrifying her creativity, not to say her mood: she won’t talk to anyone, not even her own mother. It’s not until Gia, wandering about a library archive, comes across something that vaults her back toward life—a photograph of Marta Becket, the American choreographer and dancer who passed in 2017—that she has found the person with whom she wishes to speak. Phone calls and emails out of the question, Gia writes her a letter.
This is not fan mail to the dead so much as a summons to come back to life. The return of someone deceased is a common enough trope, but where it is normally horrific—the Monkey’s Paw; the Pet Sematary franchise; etc.—Polek initially runs jolly with it. Soon after penning the letter, Marta herself appears on Gia’s doorstep. “She was wearing shiny blue underwear, and looked much younger than I,” Gia observes, “even though she died when she was ninety-two years old.” The pair go on a series of playdates and paint a mural of individuals Gia admires, including filmmakers, composers, and children’s authors, and Marta places herself above them all.
Marta, a multihyphenate in life, takes on a multitude of roles in this narrative. She is a source of waves and eddies of inspiration: an apparition, a house guest, a surrogate mother, and even a figure of sorrow that threatens to sap the narrator’s spirit. Though Becket was real person, Polek’s fictionalized “Marta” functions in a manner similar to the imagined sister of Shakespeare in Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own.” Both are mechanisms for their writers to process the past and imagine possible futures, and Bitter Water Opera is at its most compelling when it undercuts Gia’s fantasy version of Marta.
As a result, the narrator recognizes the sprinkles of pixie dust in her own life story and learns that art is not a substitute for living.
Becket’s larger-than-life persona and history, however, makes for easy mythologizing. Polek’s novel is driven by one actual incident in particular: Becket’s founding of the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction, informally Amargosa, a former boom town that has dwindled in population to the single digits. In Polek’s telling, Marta’s serendipitous project begins in the late 1960s when she discovers the unused Corkhill Hall after her and her husband blow a tire nearby that forces them to seek out help. Marta finds the old house and peeks through the door spotting an abandoned stage. “Take me,” the place seems to say. “Do something with me. I offer you life.” She listens.
Marta’s assured path is one Gia’s cannot follow to escape her artistic stagnation. She knows that mimicking someone else’s moves does not make you a choreographer, nor does having an icon make you any closer to them than anyone else could be. Slowly and painfully, what Gia realizes is that Marta did not go to the desert in search of a transformation; it found her. It made her work for it too (Becket remained at Amargosa for the rest of her life). A single performance on pointe means hours of sore feet; Gia is hardly calloused. This is the crux of the novel: that Marta has experienced what Gia longs for, a call to action as if ordained by God.
Religious mysticism is a thread that stitches this novel, (Polek has a master’s degree in divinity studies) which begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Gia is Noah waiting to be commanded to build an ark. She may identify with Marta’s artistic ambition but lacks the sharpness of her muse’s vision: “I once believed that the highest aspiration was to be someone who had an eye for things,” Gia confesses, “but over time I’d lost the sense of why and what for.” Just as Gia’s dolorous isolation begins to exhaust the reader, she unexpectedly moves, taking to the road to visit the opera house where Marta painted her audience on its walls and performed solo ballet to them.
Crucial to Gia’s grasp of how Marta found her artistic enlightenment is understanding what kind of Marta she’s revived. Though she characterizes her maternal influences as lonely eccentrics, and in some ways Marta is a composite of them (The narrator is first drawn to Becket’s physical resemblance to her own mother), Gia exalts her Marta. “Marta was different,” Gia decides. “She built an accessible grand gesture. When she disappeared, she didn’t disappear.” As the book moves toward its conclusion, Marta does disappear, patiently, giving the book a subtle sense of urgency.
Driving in the back seat of a car seems too banal for someone of Marta’s stature. “It would have been more natural if she levitated alongside me, like a sidecar,” Gia thinks. To impress her guest, she spends $250 on “duck eggs, pickled cactus, black garlic, and other impractical, elysian foods.” More whimsical than nourishing, these groceries are suited to celestial creatures, not earthbound ones.
It’s Gia’s worship-adjacent admiration that provides Polek with enough steam to train-wreck it with a disenchanting pilgrimage to the opera house, both smaller and bigger than in Gia’s imagination, and underwhelming in situ. While there, Gia feels as if she is ruminating on memory to salvage something of an authentic experience. “It was almost as if I had visited a photograph of the place or was looking at the image of a star in the sky that had already come to pass.” The paint crumbles in her fingertips. The roots of an invasive tamarisk tree cause the carpet to bubble up. A group of three female preservationists, all dressed in blue, argue about “the future the future the future” of protecting what will inevitably become a tourist attraction.
Redolent of the Fates, the preservationists catch the narrator sorting through a pile of Marta’s papers, but not quick enough to keep Gia from glimpsing a trace of Marta’s thinking: “At present, I dance, and I continue to paint. I dare not question where I go from here. I do not predict big plans for my art and the town of Death Valley Junction. Instead . . . I work. I do the best I can.” From her conversations with the trio, the narrator gathers that “the object of preservation can never be the one to do the preserving.”
Artistic preservation is not done by conservation experts but by newer work that calls back to its predecessors. Bitter Water Opera is a novel of lineage. It can be read in conversation with works of female withdrawal such as St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, Emily Dickinson’s poems, and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes.
Even the book’s cover, a sand painting by artist Cynthia Talmadge, visualizes Polek’s experiments with time, space, and artistic inspiration. Her vignettes, fine as grains of sand, come together to create an emotional landscape as vast and moving as the Mojave.
This is the real achievement of this brief novel, first promised with Polek’s 2020 story collection, Imaginary Museums—Bitter Water Opera is a work of art, one reminiscent of the sad beauty of Swan Lake. There are flashes of tiaras and pink tutus against its melancholic tenor. Its four sections—written in clear compressed sentences that mind a story while exploring mental illness, deteriorating relationships, and the possibility of a godless universe—reward a slow tempo reading.
Take for example, the novel’s engrossing past-future dynamic, best embodied by a trompe l’oeil painted in the hotel lobby. It depicts the opera house in ruin with swirls of dust surrounding it. Whether the painting depicts the place as Marta found it or predicts its demise after her departure is open to interpretation. The narrator toggles between alternate views, trying to decide which to believe in:
I closed my left eye and pretended that I was looking at the junction in the past, then opened it and closed my right eye, pretending that I was looking at the junction far into the future, after some apocalypse when the sun fell from the sky. I blinked, rapidly switching my eyes, as the image oscillated forward and backward in time, forward and backward between different paths and possibilities, between two sides of ruin, as I used to live—forward and backward—between the despairing antipossibility of my past, and the possible despair in my future. My past as a dejected lonely child of lonely people, and the future of a life alone. The past-future seesaw was suddenly so obviously nauseating to me that the room began to spin.
Gia’s Ozymandian sickness ends when she leaves the theater and chooses not the past, nor the future, but the present. She leaves Death Valley Junction and ends up in the nearby Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. It’s here that she feels “God’s touch” and exchanges her Desert Mother for her biological one, a familiar voice taking over from the fading echo as if Marta’s tomb and her mother’s womb have been as one all along.
