YELLOW PINE

End-times environmentalists tangle with the life force imperative.

The propulsively intelligent and reckless women who drive Watkins’ fiction arrive at middle age in Yellow Pine, Nevada, and the years are registering, for good and for ill. For her fourth book, Watkins names her chief protagonist Rose of Sharon after the character in The Grapes of Wrath. The story begins with Rose receiving a surprise call from Miles, a charismatic dude from two decades past, “who’d once poured salt on the slug of her heart.” Watkins uses the word “horny” in the first paragraph, and indeed this novel is enjoyably raunchy, with the midlife go-for-broke twist that the possibility of conception makes the sex hotter. Before the reader arrives there, however, a lot of “dry streams,” “drained lakes,” and “blasted valleys” must be crossed. Rose and a clutch of environmentalist friends are holding vigil for the once-public desert designated Yellow Pine, where the yucca and creosote are being pulped and the tortoises slaughtered for a 5,000-acre solar array. (This place, did, in fact, open in 2023 in the Mojave Desert outside Las Vegas.) Watkins marinates her novel in so much eco-dread, “like a penny dipped in some awful forever chemical,” that it becomes tough going, even though she writes exquisite, often funny prose. By midbook, when Miles is relentlessly schooled by the Yellow Pine protestors, it becomes close to unbearable—for him, and for the reader. It borders on histrionic, hammering home Watkins’ assertion that we are living “in a low-key failed state on a dying planet.” Still, those who persevere will be rewarded with a story that matches the growing maturity of its characters. Each has a wild list called “No Early Exits Mental Health Action Plan.” While Rose proclaims that “hope [is] for idiots and tourists,” this bracing book ends on a definite updraft. The whirlwind isn’t quite reaped yet.

The psychic impact of place—and its loss—goes deep in this blister of a novel.