In a parched southern California of the near future, Luz, once the poster child for the country’s conservation movement, and Ray, an army deserter turned surfer, are squatting in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Most “Mojavs,” prevented by armed vigilantes from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to encampments in the east. Holdouts like Ray and Luz subsist on rationed cola and water, and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.
-Goodreads
Even those who read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath with belligerent disinterest remember that novel’s miraculously bizarre ending, in which Rose of Sharon offers her breast to an old man starving in a barn. It’s a moment so gravid with the many conditions of an exhausted America that’s malnourished and emptied, but also hopeful. Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus is a work of equal desperation and ambivalence, set in a near future where a generation-long drought has ravaged the Southwest, a place that, mostly evacuated, becomes a kind of hallucinatory wasteland. Like Steinbeck’s classic, thirst is everywhere in this debut novel: spiritual thirst, sexual thirst, a thirst for understanding and for survival. But unlike his novel, thirst isn’t driving Watkins’s characters to the West, but out of it, the California dream transposed into the California nightmare.
Goodreads Reviews
3.3 rating based on 9,580 ratings (all editions)
ISBN-10: 1594634238
ISBN-13: 9781594634239
Goodreads: 24612148
Author(s): Publisher:
Published: //
In a parched southern California of the near future, Luz, once the poster child for the country’s conservation movement, and Ray, an army deserter turned surfer, are squatting in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Most “Mojavs,” prevented by armed vigilantes from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to encampments in the east. Holdouts like Ray and Luz subsist on rationed cola and water, and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.
For the moment, the couple’s fragile love, which somehow blooms in this arid place, seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins.
Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own.
