Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from December 25 to December 29
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
The first third or so of this book is the sort of near-future climate change misery-porn that has, over the last couple years, shifted my interest away from current science fiction and toward the escapist luxuries of fantasy. Harrowing, depressing, a bleak reminder of tough times almost certainly ahead for everyone of my generation, worse still for those after -- it's stuff that needs to be written, no doubt, but I get enough of it in news and science articles. I don't need it in my entertainment.
But then for a little while, the novel swerves into post-apocalyptic nature writing, beautiful and prickly, the near-future successor, perhaps, of The Field Guide to Getting Lost or The Last Cheater's Waltz. From there Gold Fame Citrus takes another detour into cults, polygamy, paranoia, conspiracy theories, Yucca Mountain, nuclear waste, mole-men. There's even a brief "primer" booklet on the supposed "neo-fauna" of the ever-growing dune sea, like something straight out of Dougal Dixon. The novel is wildly uneven, but forms a sort of microcosm of the modern West, painful and urgent and sprawling in several directions at once.
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