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.”
