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Rose, the protagonist of Claire Vaye Watkins’s latest novel, has retreated from the world to live in Nothingness Flats, a cinder-block cabin in the Nevada desert. On indefinite leave from her job at an environmental organisation, Rose works on her Al-Anon recovery, goes hiking and joins protests against the Yellow Pine of the title: a solar array being built over a fragile desert ecosystem. She writes in her journal: “I am on this side of the portal. I have compassion in my heart for anyone back on the other side, sending emails, bickering, buying useless shit, getting run by the algorithm, living in the past.” As the story begins, she is reunited with her first love, Miles, who has “fallen apart beautifully: bopped in and out of law school, then spent six years in what’s left of the redwoods reading horny 400-year-old poems before bailing on his PhD”. Soon, Rose realises what she truly wants, this side of the portal, is to have his child.
You don’t often see a sympathetic take on the subculture of 21st-century hippies, with their eclectic leftwing philosophies, new age spirituality and earnest striving to do good and be kind. It’s an important strain in modern life, and one typically dismissed with facile mockery and condescension. As a serious treatment of it, Yellow Pine has notable strengths. The love story between Rose and Miles is very real and specific to this world, and gives a backbone of plot to material that otherwise tends to sprawl. Watkins’s prose can be musical and keenly attentive, and she excels at conveying starry-eyed love. “[Miles] was brilliant, peaceful, grounded as a mountain, kind even when he was blue, an unabashed loner agog at the whole burning world.”
However, the plot meanders and has odd discrepancies. Crucially, in the beginning, Miles agrees to have unprotected sex with Rose, knowing she will keep the baby if she gets pregnant. Later, confusingly, the main conflict between them is whether he’s ready for a child, with no mention of their previous conversation.
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It also becomes maddeningly unclear how Watkins wants us to view her characters. The narration treats them affectionately – we’re clearly meant to be on their side – but their actions are often jarringly self-centred. Rose, for instance, engineers a fully paid leave from her job by threatening to support staff efforts to unionise, but she never considers really doing it; it’s just a means for her to be paid for doing nothing. She also narcs out all the local weed farms because she worries their fertiliser is leaching into her water. Many pages later, we learn that when these farms are raided by police, all their undocumented workers are deported. Rose never pauses to contemplate her role in their eventual fate. She has chosen to leave her young daughter, Juniper, in the care of her father in Pennsylvania, and Rose often laments how painful the separation is to them both. But she never considers moving closer to Juniper, and this history forms no part of her thinking about having another baby.
It’s also a problem that there are so many scenes where the characters lecture each other. This is reasonable when we’re being educated about why industrial solar arrays are a legitimate target for protest, information we need to understand the plot. It’s not so excusable when characters are making speeches about prehistoric goddess worship, the gnostic gospels or the decline in the quality of commercially available apples. In one particularly baffling scene, Rose brings a stack of climate books with her to a bar and recites long passages from them to a nonplussed bartender. Open Yellow Pine at random and you’re liable to find someone saying: “since we’re all made of star stuff and the big wheel has been turning for eternity, it makes sense that some people feel like part of you … Like maybe your potassium and my potassium were once together in the bones of some fish in Lake Lahontan”, or, “Some scholars do surmise that marriage was patriarchal religion’s incentive to power via state-sanctioned violence against women in an alliance intended to suppress the resistant Goddess worshippers”.
This often feels like hostile satire, and there are occasional judgmental speech tags such as “Rose brayed” and “Joskie squealed”. But this is apparently not the intention; in her prefatory letter to the reader, Watkins describes Yellow Pine not as satire, but as “a spiritually seeking eco-socialist novel about disillusionment and re-enchantment, and the daily practice of defending the sacred”. Watkins’s history as a political writer couldn’t be stronger: the viral essay On Pandering, the climate classic Gold Fame Citrus. She should have been the ideal person to write a sympathetic novel about this world. But in Yellow Pine, what could have been an important addition to the genre of climate fiction is instead an often likable but ultimately confusing mess.
