Gold Fame Citrus: A Novel

Claire Vaye Watkins

Sep 2015 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR,  Vanity Fair, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Refinery 29, Men's Journal, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Book Riot, Los Angeles Magazine, Powells, BookPage and Kirkus Reviews 

The much-anticipated first novel from a Story Prize-winning “5 Under 35” fiction writer.
 
In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins’s story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction. Now this young writer, widely heralded as a once-in-a-generation talent, returns with a first novel that harnesses the sweeping vision and deep heart that made her debut so arresting to a love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future:

Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most “Mojavs,” prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps. In Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs—Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the “forever war” turned surfer—squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.

The couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser—a diviner for water—and his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes.

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.

Ratings and reviews

I struggled with my rating of Claire Vaye Watkins's Gold Fame Citrus. I was bored for the first third of the book (Book One, 111 pages recounting the story of Luz, Ray, and Ig before they encounter the colony in the Dune Sea), and I know many, if not, most readers would have cut their losses long before they reached Book Two. However, Gold Fame Citrus came highly recommended by Book Riot, which described it as "a dystopian masterpiece"; it was selected for the 2016 Tournament of Books Long List; and Watkins's essay "On Pandering" was generating a lot of literary buzz, so I persevered. Was it worth it? I don't know. A masterpiece it is not, and it didn't really pay off for me until page 323 (out of 339) when Watkins departed from her conventional storytelling in a tantalizing way which I will not describe further for fear of spoiling it. It did, however, give me probably the best closing sentence I read all year, and, as all good trial lawyers know, juries give disproportionate weight to the last thing they hear (the "recency effect"). I don't consider the time I spent reading Gold Fame Citrus wasted, particularly if it gave me a leg up on the Tournament of Books Short List, but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it, either. I received a free copy of Gold Fame Citrus through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Good

About the author

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Battleborn and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” fiction writer, as well as the recipient of the Story Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the Southwest 2013, and elsewhere. An assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Watkins has also taught at Bucknell and Princeton, and she and her husband, the writer Derek Palacio, are codirectors of the Mojave School, a creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.