A Terrible Talent 
 I hated this book so much at the start that I almost threw it down after 40 pages. But I didn't, and all in all I'm glad I didn't. For then I would have missed Claire Vaye Watkins' magnificent prose and brilliant imagination. She has talent to an incredible degree, but for me it was a terrible talent, trapping me in situations that I would rather not have entered in the first place. 
 She imagines a dystopia when overconsumption and global warming eventually turn California into a parched wasteland, and all the dreams that had brought people there in the first place (gold, fame, citrus) have turned to dust. She is writing a 
 Grapes of Wrath 
 in reverse, for these people of the new Dust Bowl are fleeing East, encountering the same prejudice and resistance; Steinbeck's Okies have become Watkins' Mojavs. Her protagonist, Luz Dunn, is a former model and, ironically, selected at birth as the poster child for the environmental projects that were supposed to turn this whole situation around. Now she is a squatter in a luxury canyon home abandoned by a Hollywood starlet, accompanied by her ever-competent boyfriend Ray, a former Marine. 
 Early in the book, they encounter a gang of semi-feral druggies and are approached by a baby girl in sagging diapers who seems to adopt them. Fearing that the gang mean to harm the child (this was the point where I almost stopped), they abduct her and look for a way to take her to safety in the East. But to do so, they have to cross the Amargosa, a huge constantly-shifting desert of sand and salt that effectively isolates the western states. Though I am not generally a fan of dystopian literature, at least there was now a quest and a purpose, and the addition of the child offered some possibility of redemption. So I read on into Part II, and encountered some of the most stunning writing in the book; the following is just a tiny sample: 
 From space it seems a canyon. Unhealed yet scar-tissue white, a wound yawning latitudinal between the sluice grafts of Los Angeles and the flaking, friable, half-buried hull of Las Vegas, a sutureless gash where the Mojave Desert used to be. In the pixel promises of satellites it could be the Grand Canyon, its awesome chasms and spires, it's photogenic strata, our great empty, where so many of us once stood feeling so compressed against all that vastness, so dense, wondering if there wasn't a way to breathe some room between the bits of us....It is hard to know where to stop, because Watkins continues for many pages, each a good as the one before. Again I thought of those set pieces that Steinbeck puts into The Grapes of Wrath, as though pulling back from the misery of the surrounding chapters. But his are brief; Watkins continues in much the same vein for well over a hundred pages, changing genre frequently from description, to playscript, to nature journal, but curiously static overall. So just when I found some relief from the corrosive horror of the story so far, and was beginning to read with undisturbed admiration, I found the narrative thrust of the novel slowing almost to a standstill. Watkins takes us into a small cult of caravan dwellers on the lapping shores of the vast dune sea, gathered at the feet of a charismatic leader called Levi Zabriskie, a dowser with the mysterious ability to find water even in this inhospitable environment. Watkins, whose father was a member of the Manson family, knows cults, and I suppose the sense of suspended time bordering on psychodelic fantasy was her intention, but there was only so much I could take before my earlier revulsion turned to, of all things, boredom. 
 The rather shorter Part III manages to return us a bit to the real world, and certainly gets the plot moving again. Many of the fantasy elements turn out to have rational explanations--and not always pleasant ones--but the novel still requires huge suspension of disbelief. Though still switching rapidly between genres, Watkins engineers a rather splendid climax in a deserted turn-of-the-century variety theater, and it looks for a while as though appropriate moral values will be restored. But the endings she devises for the major characters in the final pages, although not unbelievable, just seemed nihilistic, a slap in the face. To have gone through all that for--this? What is the point? 
 [Rating? Take your pick: 5 stars for talent, 1 star for personal enjoyment, or anything in between. I am settling on 3, but it is words that matter, not numbers.]