Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus presents a brutal, shimmering, white-hot vision of what could happen if California were lost to an extreme drought. As the novel starts, a couple, Luz and Ray, stay in the abandoned Laurel Canyon mansion of a former starlet. Without water, only the dispossessed are left in the region. The Amargosa Dune Sea, a vast, growing expanse of sand, has begun to approach the city. At a rave of sorts, the couple happen upon a toddler, Ig, who is being neglected, and kidnap her, traveling into the Amargosa but running out of gasoline. Ray goes for help. Luz and Ig are found and taken in by a nomadic colony in the ever-shifting sea of sand. Levi, its leader, is a charismatic dowser who can find the water officials say is gone. This terribly beautiful, surreal, and bleak novel is thrillingly alive to the physical landscape of the desert. As Watkins puts it late in Gold Fame Citrus, having given us Levi’s bestiary, “what was vibrancy but being very, very alive?… The world was made of unseen wonders, which we might call miracles.”
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