Bitter Water Opera
By Nicolette Polek
Graywolf, 136 pages, $16
Bitter Water Opera, the debut novel by Nicolette Polek published on Tuesday, asks exciting, original, and urgently relevant questions about the value and role of art. The book is a post-break-up story, whose depressed narrator first summons a whimsical visitor, then hits the road, staying in a lonely sublet followed by an eccentric hotel. Its events are largely metaphorical, and it is written in an atmospheric prose-driven style that creates a slightly altered realism.
In its opening pages, Gia, the narrator, sends out an envelope with no address that’s “painted with watercolors” and contains a photograph of herself “dancing as a toad in my elementary school’s production of The Wind in the Willows,” along with a “pressed Whirligig daisy.” In response, an impossible visitor arrives: the real-life outsider-art figure Marta Becket, who ran an eccentric one-woman opera house in Death Valley Junction, Calif., between 1968 and 2012, and died in 2017.