Desert refuseniks, chaotic motherhood and a fight to save the Mojave: Inside Claire Vaye Watkins wild new novel
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Set us as preferred If you get out to Joshua Tree and the night is clear, look up.You’ll see not just the stars, but the entire Milky Way.
It’s a reminder that the vastness is always present, beyond the city’s bright lights.And once dawn comes, the desert performs the same magic: long horizons, unfamiliar landscapes, the creeping feeling that we are small, short-lived creatures on an immense ancient planet.
No wonder some people find it unsettling.On the Shelf Yellow Pine By Claire Vaye Watkins Riverhead Books: 256 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Not the characters in Claire Vaye Watkins’ new novel “Yellow Pine,” who embrace the desert in the extreme.They live at the far side of the Mojave Desert where California meets Nevada.
Wherefore the pines, you ask? The book’s title is a wry joke — “Yellow Pine” is not a forest, not a tree.It’s a massive solar array slated to be built nearby in the Nevada desert.
A ragtag crew of desert dwellers are hoping to stop it, or at least slow down the grinding wheels of capitalism that see the desert merely as an empty space for the taking.Primary among them is Rose, a 30-something single mom who lives near the end of a very, very long dirt road in a cabin she calls Nothingness Flats.Rose works for an environmental nonprofit that has gone remote because it’s the pandemic; she often spirals at the state of the world.
“Sometimes I think I can feel the planet just hemorrhaging under all this greed.Like it’s tectonic,” she laments.Rampant environmental destruction notwithstanding, the novel kicks off with the joyous return of Miles, the guy who got away.
He is an outdoor person, like Rose; has trouble fitting into societal norms, like Rose; and he is an idea...