Letting Oneself Look: Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera

I started reading Bitter Water Opera in the spring of 2024, as I was slowly learning to be in the world again. It marked the end of a long, cold and murky winter characterized by physical and emotional exhaustion.

Late 2023 had left me feeling disheartened by my job, where I felt like a crossover between a prison guard and a camp counselor. In January 2024, I had just come back from a solo trip to the east coast where I had experienced the aftershocks of my separation from one of my best friends and greatest loves, Pete, a few months earlier–a breakup that despite being amicable and necessary had taken place after months of intense intellectual and emotional stimulation, and so had left me disinterested in the triviality of everyday life. I was working, eating, sleeping, and then doing it all over again.

The only luxury I let myself enjoy was reading, as I could justify it as work. It also constituted my last tether to Pete and to the numerous and passionate discussions I had had with him, both as a friend and as a lover, in museums and in bed, about fiction and poetry, and that I now missed terribly. Reading was both a distraction from the personal upheaval I had been experiencing, and a reminder of everything I had lost, and failed at. When it came to reading, I had so far been mostly sticking to familiar literary territory—narratives written from the perspective of troubled American men that, for some reason, often moved me to tears: Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi. Nico Walker’s Cherry. Pete’s favorite poets, too, who had become my own: John Ashbery, Franz Wright, George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, John Berryman. All men, all so alien.

I became aware of Nicolette Polek in the weeks ahead of the release of Bitter Water Opera by Graywolf Press. I was spending quite a lot of time online then, and, suddenly, the mauve color of the book’s cover was everywhere, praised by people from all walks of the indie-lit community. I was initially wary of the book: no work of literature could be so universally liked. The synopsis, describing it as some post-gothic initiatory journey, made me even more suspicious—genre often doesn’t suit the immediacy of contemporary writing. I ordered it anyway, and forgot about it for a few weeks as it made its way to me.

Between the time I ordered Bitter Water Opera and the day it arrived, things had started to turn around in a dramatic way, professionally, at least—I had successfully interviewed for a job in a coastal city and was primed for a new beginning doing what I loved in a place that boasted a minimum of 280 sunny days a year. The mind is slow to understand and to integrate sudden changes, even good ones, and healing is a slow process. It would take me weeks to come to terms with the new reality that was to be my own. I was still working the same job, after all, living in the same place, being, essentially, the same person. I still hung out most days at the same cafes, places that had witnessed what had turned out to be some of the most difficult months in my recent private history.

As I picked up Bitter Water Opera, expecting to recognize the same brand of disaffected writing that characterized the melancholic books that had been my companions for months, I was surprised to find warmth and heart pulsating out of the first page. A poet friend had called the novel “dripping with beauty”; another, “incandescent”. Accurate assessments, both:

‘It wasn’t impossible; it was simple. I took the letter and put it in my mailbox. I wrote her name in big block letters: MARTA BECKET. She didn’t have an address anymore, so I decorated the front of the envelope with watercolors. I included a photograph of myself from childhood, dancing as a toad in my elementary school’s production of The Wind in the Willows, and a pressed Whirligig dais. At the time it was something like a prayer.’

Bitter Water Opera is written from the point of view of Gia, a young woman in the midst of personal turmoil, experiencing something akin to a depressive episode—her house is a mess, she has trouble eating, and she sleeps up to fifteen hours a day. She has just taken a leave of absence from her position in the film department at Shepherd College, and her creative projects, confined to boxes, come to a halt following her breakup with her partner, Peter. Right away, I very strongly felt that the character of Gia sat between who I felt like I was at that moment in time and what I wished an idealized, more accomplished version of me would look like. I couldn’t help but picture her with Polek’s brown hair—probably the only physical feature the author and I share.

Glamorized depictions of female dissatisfaction with life and heartbreak abound in literature, creating a blueprint for what it’s supposed to look like, its clinical picture. Those have evolved with time, from the stoic endurance of the Victorians to the manic dissociation of contemporary New Yorkers—insert fast-paced montage of a coke-thin woman dancing to EDM and snorting ketamine in the back of an Uber on her way to fuck away her feelings, or lack thereof. These images are so pervasive that they have almost become prescriptive, but I have never been able to relate to them. One might argue that other representations exist, and that’s true, but they mostly tend to exist within that spectrum. With Bitter Water Opera, Polek offers an alternative to these familiar descriptions, one that I could relate to and identify with, and that didn’t make me feel that, on top of it all, I had also failed at being sad the way I was supposed to.

The novel opens with her summoning the late artist and dancer Marta Becket by placing a letter addressed to her in her own mailbox. The next day, Marta shows up and starts living with Gia, becoming her silent companion for a while. She then disappears abruptly, sending Gia on a trip to find her(self) that will lead her first to a secluded cottage, and then to Marta’s Amargosa Opera House, in the Californian desert. Marta Becket was a dancer who discovered an abandoned adobe building in Death Valley Junction in 1967 and decided to make it her own Opera House. She painted murals featuring a fantasized audience made up of figures who inspired her and funded her project; she then choreographed and performed there until her death in 2017. Marta haunts Gia for a while, but the more Gia looks at her for a salve, for needed direction, the more elusive Marta becomes, to the point that she eventually disappears, sending Gia on a quest to find her in whatever form possible. What she’ll discover, at the end of the literal and metaphorical road leading to the Amargosa Opera House, is Marta’s decaying legacy, only populated by three Carringtonesque figures, a red-haired tourist, and tumbleweeds.

The novel ends as Gia returns to her life, self-same but also a little bit different. She was transformed in ways the eye, and so the reader, can’t see, because Polek, despite the treasures of language she deals in, chose to show us rather than telling us what was happening to Gia. And because she is the one narrating her own story, we experience a level of intimacy with the character which is at odds with how elusive she remains to us.

The portrayal of Gia’s pain and subsequent journey, however, are not relatable because they are realistic, but because they say something about experiencing stillness in its relation to time. Polek shows her existing in the nondescript space of grief, where even the slightest movement is a threat to her hard-earned sense of peace. The author’s gaze, then, in an effort to show Gia’s unrushed emergence from drowsiness, caresses her awakening slowly, softly, painting it in small, sometimes unnoticeable increments.

I was surprised to discover that the scope of the novel went beyond just the personal experience of change, loss, guilt and incomprehension. It also embraced a humble reflection on impermanence and faith, reflections that I related to on a metaphorical level, rather than literal. The text embraces the form of the parable without, however, ever imposing any kind of moral viewpoint to the reader. The eerie, ethereal quality of the novel makes for a reading experience that is suspended to the poetry of the language. I followed Gia on Marta’s footsteps as if in a dream, consciously choosing to suspend my disbelief.

Upon closing the book, I realized that I had read Bitter Water Opera the way I usually look at paintings—intently at first, trying to figure it out, focused on the minute details, trying to figure out what the painter wanted me to see; then letting my mind drift, making unexpected connections to other pieces, other times, other places, other selves—memories.

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Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera (2024) is available from Graywolf Press.

Ellie Wright teaches and writes in NYC.