The desert swallowing Los Angeles is, to adapt a well-known coinage, among the city’s deepest images of itself. How could it not be, given that this is a landscape that sits within an ecosystem marked by drought and other natural disruptions, which only highlights the evanescence of everything we humans have built? Such an idea plays its own role in the Southern California literary imagination, from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower to Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach. “A little agony was just what this place needed,” Claire Vaye Watkins writes in her 2015 novel, Gold Fame Citrus. “Reintroduce hardship into the regional narrative.”
The irony—as Watkins understands, and one that the recent Los Angeles wildfires have only further catalyzed—is that hardship doesn’t need to be reintroduced; it has been a territorial imperative all along. “Reason,” Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, “is the first casualty in a drought.” The line might stand as an epigraph to Watkins’s novel, which takes place in the near future and begins as its protagonists, Luz and her boyfriend, Ray, hole up in an abandoned Laurel Canyon mansion.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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Something—let’s admit it—feels exciting about such a premise, something that smacks of (dare I say it?) possibility. I don’t mean to suggest that aspiration and ambition typify the city, but rather that they describe it in a more existential sense. As Watkins wrote last fall in the Yale Review, “desire never kept its promises, and so many of my achievements had only made me emptier: achurn with a nothingness that tightened my chest and filled my guts with dread.” Something similar might be said of Luz, who, as a child, was used as the face of the Bureau of Conservation’s propaganda, a past from which she is trying to separate.
This isn’t to suggest that Gold Fame Citrus is autobiographical—except, of course, in the way that every work of art must be. When it comes to Watkins, this emerges in how she treats the desert, where she was raised and to which she has continued to return. The novel offers an expression of this movement, especially after Luz and Ray end up caring for a two-year-old, Ig. Desperate to get clear of anyone who might lay claim to the child, they try to depart the ruined city, a turning point that feels unavoidable.
Watkins is an exquisite writer; her prose shifts and sparkles and surprises. She is also unafraid to explore the implications of her material, not least that of Ig, whose presence is transformative. Was she rescued or kidnapped by Luz and Ray? The answer, perhaps, is both or neither, for the world of Gold Fame Citrus is one in which conventional modalities no longer apply.
Rather, this is a novel about survival, which does not preclude the desire for annihilation—the clean, sharp inevitability of death. The paradox, of course, is that only in the face of obliteration may we truly recognize ourselves.•
Join us on May 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Claire Vaye Watkins will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Karen Russell to discuss Gold Fame Citrus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
