Sweet names can mask sinister places. Take, for example, Yellow Pine, a fictional site that is also the title of Claire Vaye Watkins’s third novel. Yellow Pine’s a contested space: the phrase describes both a poorly-conceived green energy project and the protest camp that pops up to counter its existence. The conflict between the two looms over a couple gripped in midlife crisis in this smart, spiky novel.
Much like Watkins’s previous work, “Yellow Pine” takes place in the ravaged American Southwest that exists beyond the polish of Palm Springs and the tourists of Joshua Tree. Here, Watkins explores isolated communities in the Mojave desert soon after the Covid lockdown faded into the rearview mirror of American imagination. Watkins deploys incredible grace and rich humor as she populates this stark landscape with eccentric characters struggling with recovery, a society out of step with humanity, environmental doom, and the boom and bust of tourism ventures. Don’t expect quirky neighbors chatting among the cacti, but instead imagine a beer at the Rattler Room with Travis, “a baker with sad eyes and a long, granite-colored beard he wore in a braid,” or Fran, “an ecofeminist Whitmanic poetess of equine bearing on hiatus from her PhD at UNLV.” While this isn’t “Gilmore Girls” out west, Watkins relieves the tension of daily life through her ragtag team of characters infused with inscrutable charm. You may not want to join their daily struggle, but you appreciate it — and deeply enjoy their company.
Our central character (the anti-Lorelai Gilmore) is Rose, a thirty-nine-year-old divorced mother with a job fundraising for the Sierra Club, who lives in Nothingness Flats, “a cinderblock cabin on five acres of treeless desert she’d miraculously purchased in Tecopa, a defiantly unproductive jackrabbit homestead forty miles from her childhood home.” Here she lives alone. It was the untimely death of her mother that triggered a grief-borne “carapace of numbness [that] crusted over her despairing soul” and broke whatever was left of Rose’s tepid marriage to a staid, safe man. Now, Rose’s twelve-year-old daughter Juniper spends the academic year with her father Will in Philadelphia, which leaves her in Rose’s hands during holidays and summers.
Remote work on hiatus, a prematurely empty nest, and the awkward aftershock of lockdown has left Rose feeling as though she’d stepped beyond a portal, a place where “hope for the future [was] plainly useless in this futureless moment.” Casting about for purpose, Rose connects with the protesters at Yellow Pine. The people there cry that the proposed solar array project would “would scrape away the ancient, delicately interlocking stones geologists called desert pavement, an intricate formation of rocks millions of years in the making, sending up a tremendous slo-mo explosion of toxic dust,” destroying the local habitat of the region’s native tortoises.
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Amid her midlife crisis, no distractions or therapy prepares Rose for the return of her college boyfriend and greatest heartbreak, Miles. Charming, educated, and restless, Miles has disappointed Rose before, first through infidelity and again through his lack of support after her father’s death. But Covid lockdown changed him, and the former lovers reconnect when he asks her to “participate in his nightly be-okay ritual, prong one of his Twelve-Pronged No Early Exits Mental Health Action Plan: Phone-A-Friend.”
Their romance builds and then languishes as Miles panics, then retreats. Meanwhile, Rose recognizes her desire for a second child, a second chance at motherhood and family life. Here, Watkins treads familiar emotional territory, revisiting the environmental doom that suffused her second novel, “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness.” But unlike some of the other characters in novels of midlife frustration, Rose continually looks beyond herself. It’s the community, stupid.
Time and again, it’s neighbors and fellow community members who delightfully interrupt Rose’s ruminations. The offbeat pastors, salty bartenders, dashing drifters, and edgy academics quote Dylan (“To live outside the law, you must be honest”) and reference Alison Bechdel and Lucinda Williams. Snap out of it, these voices tell the reader. We live in a scarred earth and had better make the most of it while it’s still habitable. Watkins skillfully chronicles a world of chosen families and iconoclast women who can’t deny their sentimental hearts. There’s nothing cozy about her imagined homeland, but its gravitational pull reminds us why we can’t give up fighting for the planet. Under one name or another, Watkins reminds us that there’s no place like home.
Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Yellow Pine
By Claire Vaye Watkins
Riverhead, 256 pages, $29