“Yellow Pine” by Claire Vaye Watkins Review: Mojave Desert Novel

Claire Vaye Watkins’s virtuosic third novel, Yellow Pine, builds on the images of the Mojave Desert that mark her earlier work. In this one, Rose—single midlife mother, political activist, Sierra Club employee, and wilderness devotee—visits the titular, real-life Nevada site as an act of both protest and wonderment. Yellow Pine is a portion of formerly public desert that a private energy company has claimed in order to build a large solar farm. Environmentalist neighbors, along with a sometimes-lover, Miles, join Rose there, where the group share meals and observations. At least one member, Pastor Jack, offers the occasional prayer. Describing the hours at Yellow Pine, Rose tells Miles, “It’s not a blockade,” adding, “We’re not delusional. It’s more of a vigil. Mourning the land as we knew it.”

There is a clear parallel between Rose’s impulse to preserve and protect her environment and her unabashed love for Miles, with whom she has broken up once before. Even as she enjoys his company, she lives with a heightened sense of the possibility that it could all end again—another act of preemptive mourning. Her fixation on this possibility frustrates her: “Love wasn’t a debt, she knew, wasn’t owed, wasn’t on layaway. It did not have to be earned. Love could not be coerced through scarcity, cajoled by implied threats, should not be yanked back if unmatched like some sadistic philanthropist’s so-called gift.” Loving something, Rose asserts, does not make it stay. For all of the novel’s irreverence, jokes, and celebration of pleasure, its connective tissue is grief. Watkins explores the pain that comes with living in the ephemeral.

Rose’s artistic, political, and physical ambitions electrify Watkins’s novel, but the work’s overriding concern is what it takes to accept boundaries and limitations. Rose’s daughter, Juniper, spends the school year with her father on the East Coast, and her absence continually plagues Rose. At times, Watkins addresses this directly—“The hours she once spent taking care of Juniper…became a chasm”—but she also inserts occasional, viscerally painful details, such as the empty booster seat in Rose’s car. Rose longs for another child, but she can’t trust Miles to stay. Likewise, the Yellow Pine vigil is, to some degree, an exercise in saying goodbye to a place the group desperately does not want to lose.

One thing Rose refuses to lose is her own hard-earned expertise. The novel painstakingly catalogs the names of places, mountains, and plants. Rose and her friends resist the notion of information as limitless and easily accessible. Instead, they largely rely on books, observation, and memory for knowledge; they learn through conversation with one another, far from the glow of a screen. In their long, fast-paced, exhilarating discussions, the reader can feel just how much fun Watkins is having as she writes.

Among the best pages here is the physical letter Rose sends to Miles as the novel opens, giving him directions to her home. “Don’t blindly follow your phone!” Rose writes. “It won’t work anyway. There’s no cell service in Tecopa.” She advises Miles to pass “a stand of battered mailboxes” and “a thicket of cane grass,” warning once more: “Ignore your phone.” If this is partly a philosophical stance, it is also a practical matter: To find Rose, Miles must rely on what he can see around him.

The conversation around Yellow Pine will almost inevitably invoke climate fiction—but Watkins playfully critiques “cli-fi” as a concept. Rose, reacting to a New York Times headline, “IS THIS THE YEAR YOU FINALLY READ A BOOK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?,” thinks to herself, “You don’t need to Finally Read a Book about Climate Change to get the bad news.” It is true that in these pages water is scarce, tortoises are endangered, and the desert is misunderstood. And during Rose’s early entanglements with Miles, she listens to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as she drives the distance back and forth between their homes. Although Rose is on paid leave for much of the novel’s span, her work has left her feeling somewhat cynical. “They’d all—and Rose had to include herself in this—become self-righteous harpies, strutting from their standing desks to the break room and back with their correct reusable water bottles spattered with faded stickers demanding radical solutions that would never come.” This cynicism fades when held up against Rose’s enduring love of the desert.

“Newcomers called this place empty,” Watkins writes. “Here nothingness was a prayer, a worshipful cry let loose by the staggering expanse.” The entire novel is itself a “worshipful cry,” brimming as it does with granular details of the landscape it beholds with such respect. Watkins gives the ground beneath Rose’s feet as much lineage, history, and scar tissue as any of the human characters, if not more; Yellow Pine notes each transition of ownership or moment of theft, each bestowal of a new name.

The novel teems with literary allusions—Joan Didion, Flannery O’Connor, Walt Whitman, and Lydia Davis, among others. Rose’s true name (Rose of Sharon) is drawn from Steinbeck. Rose’s mother, Alice, reads Melville to young Rose when she’s in the bath. Late in the novel, in a chapter called “Ode to Alice,” Rose recalls her mother’s assertion that “Books…were the next best thing to sitting around a fire.” The next best thing, indeed. Readers are fortunate to have Watkins adding her own work to the stack.•