Novel of the futuristic West a well-written debut

“Gold Fame Citrus” by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead Books, 342 pages, $27.95)

We get many books from East Coast writers, but few from the West. Claire Vaye Watkins, who writes from the West, is a promising new writer on the horizon, one to watch.

She is the author of “Battleborn,” a story collection, and “Gold Fame Citrus” is her first novel. It is well-written, intriguing and offers a vivid picture of where we may be heading.

Set in a bleak future in which a drought-ravaged Southern California has become a desert where “the water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been denied them so long that with each day, each project, it became more and more impossible to conceive of a time when it had not been denied them.”

Sky blue is “a color named before the sky went bloodred with ash, and that before blood went xanthic for want of iron.”

As the novel opens, Luz and Ray are squatting in an abandoned mansion owned by a Hollywood starlet. On a trip to a bonfire at a nearby beach, they encounter a young girl and rescue her from a group of people that seems to care little for her welfare.

Back at the mansion, they soon learn about the work of caring for a toddler, and Watkins captures this well in detail: “Ray was mopping up the pee with a monogrammed beach towel and Ig (the child) was crawling along the stone ledge in front of the fireplace, wagging her bare bottom.”

Following up on a lead, the two head out of the city into the desert in an old car, looking for a settlement with water, somewhere beyond California. But they run out of gas. Ray heads back to look for help, leaving Luz and Ig with the car and what little water they have left.

People from a group that has survived in the desert find the woman and child and take them into their community, with its charismatic and autocratic leader, Levi, who is supposedly a “dowser,” able to find water with his hands.

Watkins goes into detail about this world of “sandalanches,” and Levi teaches Luz about the many animals he’s found in what Levi calls the Amargosa Dune Sea.

But is Levi who he says he is? Or is this community “a madman’s colony, an outpost in the cruel tradition of outposts, peopled by prostitutes and loners and rejects and criminals and liars, their sheriff a con and a thief and surely worse,” as Ray sees it?

Watkins’ great achievement here is her vivid imagination in creating this world where desolation mixes with nostalgia and hope. Ray remembers the neighborhood where he grew up, where “there were barbecues with half-used tins of lighter fluid beside them, folding plastic lawn furniture in every backyard except his.”

She also has a didactic bent, making clear that this desert world is the result of human activity. “Who had diverted the coast’s rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater?” Drilling deep into the aquifer resulted in “a major tendril of interstate collaps[ing] into a mile-wide sinkhole, killing everybody on it, as all of the Southwest went moonscape with sinkage, as the winds came and as Phoenix burned and as a white-hot superdune entombed Las Vegas.”

Watkins portrays this land where “eyes peeled for the flash of ore, the flash of camera, the wet flash of fruit. Gold, fame, citrus” — but where now people desperately seek water in order to survive.

She also portrays the human need for meaning, for connection, for faith. Luz tells another woman, “You can’t see that from the outside, how frightening it can be to believe.”

“Gold Fame Citrus” explores not only a future landscape of the West but the inner landscape of its characters as they try to live as human beings in such a harsh environment.

This story was originally published January 8, 2016 at 2:42 PM with the headline "Novel of the futuristic West a well-written debut."