Gold Fame Citrus
Claire Vaye Watkins, 2015
Penguin
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634239
Summary
A love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future. Watkin's debut novel harnesses the same sweeping vision and deep heart that made her prize-winning story collection so arresting.
Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most "Mojavs," prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps.
In Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs—Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the "forever war" turned surfer—squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.
The couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins.
They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser—a diviner for water—and his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes.
Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1984
• Where—Bishop, California, USA
• Raised—Mojave Desert (in California and Nevada)
• Education—B.A., University of Nevado-Reno; M.F.A., Ohio State University
• Awards—(below)
• Currently—teaches at the University of Michigan
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author, whose 2012 story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction.
Born in Bishop, California, Watkins was raised in the Mojave Desert—first in Tecopa, California, and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow.
Writing
Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, New York Times and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation’s "5 Under 35."
In 2015 she released her debut novel Gold Fame Citrus to wide accclaim, praised for its originality and masterful writing.
Awards
Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Watkins has never been afraid to take structural risks in her work. Her...novel is interspersed with sections that break abruptly away from the story of Luz and Ray’s flight into sand, expanding the scope of the novel well beyond their lives. These leaps usually pay off—a chapter set in a psychiatric ward saves the latter half of the book from nihilism, for instance, and the section involving the businessman on the plane is spectacular. But not all of the stand-alone chapters connect.... But if this book is sometimes frustrating, it’s also fascinating. A great pleasure of the book is Watkins’s fearlessness, particularly in giving her characters free rein to be themselves.
Emily St. John Mandel - New York Times Book Review
A gripping, provocative debut novel.
Boston Globe
A beautiful debut novel.... Watkins' vision is profoundly terrifying. It's a novel that's effective precisely because it's so realistic—while Watkins' image of the future is undeniably dire, there's nothing about it that sounds implausible.... She also writes with a keen understanding of human nature, both good and bad. She has a genuine compassion for the Angelenos who have chosen to remain in their dying, desiccated city as well as for the ones who have evacuated.... The prose in Gold Fame Citrus is stunningly beautiful, even when—especially when—Watkins is describing the badlands that Southern California has become…. One might think there are only a few ways to portray a landscape that has become, essentially, nothing, but Watkins writes with a brutal kind of beauty, and even in the book's darkest moments, it's impossible to turn away. It's an urgent, frequently merciless book, as unrelenting as it is brilliant. Watkins forces us to confront things we'd probably rather ignore, but because we're human, we can't.
Los Angeles Times
Watkin’s narrative is mythic and speculative, its sediment forming and re-forming in lists, treatises, and reports. The writing, with its tough sentimentality, is reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s, but Watkins has a style of mordant observation all her own.
Harper's
[Gold Fame Citrus] burns with a dizzying, scorching genius.
Vanity Fair
At once beautiful and profoundly unsettling, [Gold Fame Citrus] sears its way into the brain, burning hot through the devastating journey and lingering long after the last page is turned.
Elle
Unsettingly resonant.... Watkins, whose brilliant short-story collection, Battleborn, revealed a deep understanding of the darker American mythologies, finds it’s not simply water we’re thirsty for.
Vogue
Watkins is at her best here, characterizing the easy slide from isolation to the open arms of an accepting, if ultimately wayward, community.... Gold Fame Citrus is a different kind of dystopia; one that illuminates the spiritual coping mechanisms of those living in an apocalyptic wasteland.
Huffington Post
(Starred review.) It's the near future: water is running out and a vast sand dune that covers whole towns is growing.... [Watkin's] book is packed with persuasive detail, luminous writing, and a grasp of the history (popular, political, natural, and imagined) needed to tell a story that is original yet familiar, strange yet all too believable.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Plagued by severe water shortages, the residents of California (already dwindling in number) are subjected to a forced evacuation.... [W]ith its damaged and complicated heroine and multiple voices, shifting perspectives, and unconventional narrative devices, [Gold Fame Citrus] is a wholly original work. —Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Spectacular… In Margaret Atwood mode, Watkins spikes this fast-moving, high-tension, sexyecocrisis saga with caustic parodies and resounding allusions that cohere into a knowing and elegiac tale of scrappy adaptation and epic loss.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A tour-de-force first novel.... Watkins writes an unforgettable scene with a carousel; another in a dank tunnel where the couple seeks contraband blueberries. The author freckles her fiction with incantations, odd detours, hallucinations, and jokes.... [M]agnificently original.
Kirkus Reviews
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