RDew, the protagonist of Claire Way Watkins’ 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 organization, Rose works on her Al-Anon recovery, goes hiking and joins the protests against Yellow Pine of the title: a solar array being built on a fragile desert ecosystem. She writes in her journal: “I am on this side of the portal. I have compassion for anyone on the other side, who is sending emails, getting into fights, buying useless things, following algorithms, living in the past.” As the story begins, she is reunited with her first love, Miles, who is “beautifully separated: commuted to law school, then spent six years reading 400-year-old poems left in the redwoods before going on to his PhD”. Soon, Rose realizes that what she really wants, on this side of the portal, is to have her child.
You don’t often see a sympathetic view of the 21st century subculture of hippies, with their liberal leftist philosophy, New Age spirituality and serious effort to do good and be kind. This is a significant tension in modern life, and is usually dismissed with easy derision and condescension. In its serious healing form, Yellow Pine has remarkable powers. The love story between Rose and Miles is very real and specific to this world, and gives the backbone of the plot to material that would otherwise be dispersed. Watkins’ prose can be musical and deeply observant, and she excels at conveying starry-eyed love. “(Miles) was brilliant, peaceful, down to earth as a mountain, kind even when blue, a fearless loner in a whole burning world.”
However, the plot meanders and has strange inconsistencies. Crucially, initially, Miles agrees to have unprotected sex with Rose, knowing that if she becomes pregnant she will keep the baby. Later, confusingly, the main conflict between them is whether she is ready to have a baby, with no mention of their previous conversation.
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It also becomes extremely unclear how Watkins wants us to view his characters. The narrative treats them affectionately – we’re clearly on their side – but their actions are often self-centered. For example, Rose takes a fully paid leave from her job by threatening to support the employees’ efforts to form a union, but she never actually thinks about doing so; It is just a means for him to get paid for doing nothing. She also destroys all the local weed farms because she is worried about their fertilizer getting into her water. Several pages later, we learn that when these farms are raided by the police, all of their undocumented workers are deported. Rose never stops to consider her role in their ultimate fate. She has decided to leave her young daughter, Juniper, in her father’s care in Pennsylvania, and Rose often laments how painful the separation is for both of them. But she never thinks about getting close to Juniper, and this history plays no part in her thinking about having another child.
It’s also a problem that there are several scenes where characters lecture each other. It’s fair when we are being educated about why industrial solar arrays are a legitimate target for protest, we need information to understand the plot. This isn’t so forgivable when the characters are lecturing about prehistoric goddess worship, the Gnostic gospel, or the declining quality of commercially available apples. In one particularly shocking scene, Rose brings a stack of climate-related books with her to a bar and recites long excerpts from them to a frustrated bartender. Open Yellow Pine at random and you might find someone saying: “Since we’re all made of star stuff and the big wheel has been turning for eternity, it makes sense that some people feel like a part of you… like maybe your potassium and my potassium were once together in the bones of some fish in Lake Lahontan”, or, “Some scholars speculate that marriages are linked to a coalition of people coming to power through state-sanctioned violence against women. It was a promotion of patriarchal religion, the purpose of which was to suppress the resistant goddess.
This often sounds like hostile sarcasm, and sometimes even judgmental speech tags like “rose braided” and “josky squealed”. But apparently that’s not the intention; In his introductory letter to the reader, Watkins describes Yellow Pine not as a satire, but as “a spiritually searching eco-socialist novel about disillusionment and re-attraction, and the daily practice of protecting the sacred.” Watkins’ history as a political writer couldn’t be stronger: Viral Essay on Pandering, Climate Classic Gold Fame Citrus. He should have been the ideal person to write a sympathetic novel about this world. But in Yellow Pine, what could have been an important contribution to the genre of climate fiction turns out to be an often likable but ultimately confusing mess.
