(I’ve been in Berlin since August because my boyfriend is here, and the pandemic being what it is, with the new laws put in place, he can’t come to the US with me.) I feel very settled in the United States. It’s maybe a little different now, I’m a bit older. I moved to New York in 2013 not knowing a single person, and essentially started fresh. Madeleine WattsI think that was definitely how I felt when I left Australia. Why California?” The narrator responds, “Because it has nothing to do with me and I have nothing to do with it.” How do you relate to this-or do you? JamesThe narrator of The Inland Sea dreams of moving away from Australia, and when she decides on the United States, her friend says: “I was so sure you’d go to Europe.

Watts and I met in graduate school, and over the past several years I’ve enjoyed walking and talking with her in our shared neighborhood, which is bordered on two sides by water and sits above a decades-old petroleum plume left over from one of the largest recorded oil spills in the country’s history. The narrator acknowledges the hubris in her ancestor’s quest and leaves us to consider how our descendants might see ours. His 1817 search along the Lachlan River for the mythical inland sea mirrors her own search for love, belief, the self, her future.

She takes notes at work, while she reads, and as she reflects on the notebooks of her great-great-great-great grandfather, the surveyor general John Oxley. Her job begins to take an emotional toll on her, and she attempts to make sense of her place in a crisis-filled world by keeping a record. Many of the calls she fields are related to extreme weather such as fires, floods, and heatwaves-all of which are based on real weather events from 2013, the year in which the book is set.Īdrift and inclined toward “abandon the everyday project of safety,” the narrator gets blackout drunk and has unprotected sex with strangers and with her ex. An aspiring writer, the narrator has just graduated from university and taken a job in the call center at Triple Zero, dispatching emergency calls from across Australia. “Emergency police, fire, or ambulance?” This refrain punctuates the narrator’s days in Madeleine Watts’s debut novel, The Inland Sea(Catapult).

Madeleine watts the inland sea