![]() ![]() Watkins’s acute understanding of place puts her in the company of authors such as Richard Ford and Annie Proulx, writers for whom scenery is an indisputable force that provokes action. ![]() The stories in Battleborn take many forms: a sequence of yearning epistles sent to a man whose belongings were abandoned on the roadside a heartbroken young woman imagining a series of plaques that catalog her breakup as though it were a museum exhibit and in one of the few stories set outside of Watkins’s home state, a genre fable about the 1849 California gold rush and its attendant “gold fever.” Watkins also addresses what might be the elephant in the room for history buffs and/or creeps-her father’s involvement with Charles Manson-with a seemingly autobiographical story that finds a fictional Claire fending off the advances of a Hollywood producer. The commanding setting, as portrayed by Watkins, is the book’s ubiquitous central figure. Events don’t simply transpire in a convenient locale, they’re spurred by the dry heat or stimulated by the encroaching desert. The people Watkins writes about aren’t just characters, they’re inhabitants of a landscape. Anyone who knows Nevada as “The Battle Born State” will understand immediately that Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut story collection is about environment. ![]()
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