God’s Touch in Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera
Nicolette Polek’s debut novel Bitter Water Opera is slim, written in four fragmented parts. The novel tracks the first person narrator’s developing existential spiral, which is eventually recuperated by a religious reckoning. The first section follows present-day Gia in crisis as she is visited by the ghost of Marta Becket, dancer and founder of the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction. The second section details Gia’s days spent in a borrowed home in the forest, owned by the mysterious (some would say ghostly) Simone. The third part involves Gia’s stay at the decrepit Amargosa Hotel and Opera House, which leads to her spiritual awakening in Death Valley National Park. The fourth involves the narrator’s return to her life, to her mother, her mother’s garden, and her newfound dedication to God.
The work’s size, its breathless metaphors, and its coquette-ish design all point toward contemporary trends that have spawned due to digitally-minded, attention-deficit reading lives. However, as a departure from other contemporary fragmentation, the book’s preoccupation with mysticism creates an internal justification for such formal choices. Rather than using small sections as a way to ease the reader into a book, the empty space on the page demands heightened participation in which the reader’s imagining of the missing narrative tissue itself becomes an act of faith.
The book opens with a religious act. Gia addresses a letter to the deceased Marta Becket. Polek acknowledges the religious implications of such a plea: “At the time it was something like a prayer” (Polek, 5). The hedging that exists here, in the garbled nature of “something like,” falls away as the book progresses toward its spiritual conclusion. The prose is at its most successful and salient when its present day setting rubs up against the ancient implications of the narrator’s mysticism. When Marta’s ghost appears the narrator observes: “She was wearing shiny blue underwear, and looked much younger than I, even though she died when she was ninety-two years old” (Polek, 6). The modernity of “shiny blue underwear” grates wonderfully against the implication of “ninety-two years old.” The prose draws necessary energy from the gaps between its disparate registers.
While the spiritual nature of the text is obvious and generative, it operates in the contemporary space of an increasingly secular culture, which produces another sort of friction. When writing about Virginia Woolf’s contested relationship with Christianity, Emily Griesinger outlines the requisites for “religious” fiction: “(1) she is conscious of unseen realities beneath or within the ordinary world; (2) she experiments with narrative technique in an effort to express or convey the inner world where the spirit or soul resides; (3) she employs religious imagery as part of this effort…” (Griesinger, 439). Borrowing from this three-pronged definition, Polek’s book is undoubtedly more religious and more reconciled with the idea and presence of God than many other contemporary texts and Mrs. Dalloway. Much of the contention and friction that Griesinger analyzes relates to Woolf’s professed public atheism in relation to the use of Christian mysticism in her work. Polek, who holds an MA from Yale Divinity school, has a less contested relationship with religion which allows the friction to be drawn not from the fissures between mysticism and religion, but between her novel’s contemporary secular world and her character’s spiritual encounters.
Polek structures her novel around the dissection of “unseen realities” and the moments when they poke through the surface of real life. Her strongest investigation of these layers occurs during the narrator’s meditation on limerence: “My limerent life ran through my head in tandem with my real life, a daydream on steroids, which simultaneously pulsed with dopamine and deflated reality into something transparent and malnourished. My limerent life was a scam, a subterfuge, … a growing of a second person inside myself until I never said what I meant nor knew what I wanted” (Polek, 51-52). The narrator’s limerent life, her tendency to live inside a daydream, reflects an interior life that reaches for a higher power, of grasping in the spiritual realm for meaning. Here, the “second person” functions as what Griesinger names the “unseen reality beneath or within the ordinary world.”
Polek’s prose is flooded with figurative imagery. To return to Griesinger, this abundance of metaphor and simile functions as Polek’s experimentation with narrative technique to “convey the inner world where the spirit or soul resides.” Polek’s reliance on simile also renders visible the limerent life on the page; the imagery becomes “a daydream on steroids.” In an example of such metaphoric extravagance, on one page, the narrator “felt like an octopus in a matchbox,” Marta moved “like falling ash,” and the narrator walked “with a lightning bolt in my heart” (Polek, 13). As a result, the main plot of the book is left “transparent and malnourished.” The limerent life reflects both the religious crisis of the narrator and the narrative crisis of the book’s formal construction.
Polek creates a rich second world, a framework of imagery that hovers above direct action. The meditation on the narrator’s limerent life coincides with the most dramatic in-scene action of the novel: the narrator lassoes a deer corpse floating in the pond to leave to rot in the borrowed backyard of her friend Simone’s house. By naming the structurally charged limerent second life, and then reinvigorating the direct action, or the novel’s “reality,” this scene serves as a narratively propulsive moment where both the “ordinary world” and the “unseen realities” are acknowledged and freshly charged with action, tension, and deliberation.
The novel culminates in a full religious awakening in Badwater, the lowest point in the country, located in Death Valley National Park. Polek writes, “A most present thing occurred, like a flare, all flame, from all sides. A presence that was strong and wild, shattering enough to place at the front of something, shook me” (Polek, 102). Here, Polek pairs Gia’s communion with nature to her spiritual awakening; she later describes this moment as “God’s touch!” (Polek, 103). Rather than employing ‘religious imagery’ as Griesinger outlines in her third point, Polek utilizes natural imagery, “flare, all flame,” to convey the in-scene presence of the divine and of God.
In its end, the story successfully transcends the trappings of much hyper-fractured contemporary literature by telling a new/old story of religious fulfillment. While its fragmentation and material reality refer to present day life, the explicitly religious narrative arch recalls historical modes of storytelling. Griesinger’s three-pronged definition of religious texts offers a useful starting point for analyzing the inner workings of Bitter Water Opera. Ultimately, the book turns entirely to God in that it becomes explicitly religious rather than symbolically or linguistically referential. At this point, the soul becomes the substance of the book, rather than the thing hovering in the periphery. The soul’s communion with God is the climactic scene; religion gives the narrative its arch. While the thin plot and the abundant figurative language could leave some readers wanting more, the book utilizes a new and modern form for its own freshly spiritual aims: “God’s touch” in the time of “shiny blue underwear.” The disparate time associations between the modern form and the religious content invigorate the text, and it is from this rich contrast that Polek draws her debut’s triumph.
About the Author:
Ali Banach is a writer from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in The Vassar Review, Angel Food Magazine, and elsewhere.
Works Cited
Griesinger, Emily. “Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 64, no. 4, 2015, pp. 438–64. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26194858. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Polek, Nicolette. Bitter Water Opera. Graywolf Press, 2024.