Yellow Pine | Claire Vaye Watkins

 

As Watkins’ celebrated Gold, Fame, Citrus showed, she has never been interested in comfortable fiction. Her latest novel, set in the Mohave desert, digs deeper into the discomfort through its protagonist Rose, an on-and-off Twelve-Stepper circling an old flame and craving another baby. The Yellow Pine of the title –a real solar farm in Nevada – embodies the central tension of the book: the collision between “green” energy and the wild land it demolishes. The result is a story that mourns the land as Rose knew it while insisting, stubbornly, on love, joy, humour, and the hope of future life amid the ruins: a novel that understands grief and vitality are not opposites, but conjoined twins.