Maybe all a story needs is a blazing conceit. Imagine a couple, comfortably midlife. Now imagine they are both writers. The gambit seems perfectly designedβwe learn they take this trip every year; we learn the solitude is meant to operate like imaginative fuel.
Her debut novel, The Beforelands , is an extraordinary innovation in fiction, as ruggedly beautiful as it is formally challenging. Vallianatos is the master of cold laughter, of the marginally amused sideways glance that murders you a little bit.
Her output is spare. Every single word she writes is true. Sometimes you need to make an alarming mess in order to create. Writers cannot save us, Vallianatos seems to say in her story. They can barely save themselves. They treated themselves at the end of each year with a trip to the desert. There was something unfailingly optimistic about the long, light sky, and by the time they arrived in Desert Hot Springs at a hotel with three naturally heated springs on its property, they were both in high spirits.
They kissed goodbye. She could afford to be frivolous with this woman, this pleasant helper in peacock feather earrings who was not the manager of the hotel. Laurel could just make out the manager standing at a worktable in the back, using a curved knife to cut a block of green glycerin soap into cakes for the rooms.
This was her third visit, and the manager would not let on whether she remembered her or not. The helper led her out of the lobby, across the patio, and to her room. All of the rooms opened onto the patio. White linen curtains hung from a line strung inside the double glass doors.
