PROPERTIES OF THIRST

A sweeping, cinematic story of love and family set against the dramatic backdrop of World War II and the American West.

“You can’t save what you don’t love.” That’s the first sentence of Wiggins' new novel and a leitmotif throughout the book—a love story, in the classic sense, as well as a love letter to an American West celebrated by Hollywood even as it was sucked dry by the city of Los Angeles. It's also a lesson in how Wiggins’ languid, linguistically lush and lyrical novel, set in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, found its way to completion. As the author’s daughter, photographer Lara Porzak, relays in an afterword, Wiggins was just a few chapters shy of completing the book when, in 2016, she suffered a massive stroke that affected her sequencing logic and short-term memory. Porzak worked from Wiggins’ notes and with a collaborator to help her mother complete the novel, saving it as a true labor of love. Given that painstaking process and the breathtaking beauty of the bulk of this novel, it would be ungrateful to gripe that the end doesn’t quite live up to the standard set by the previous chapters. To be sure, Wiggins set an extremely high bar. The book follows the experiences of several memorable characters, including Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes, the scion of a wealthy East Coast railroad magnate, who has reinvented himself as a hardworking ranch man and impassioned preservationist; a Chicago-raised Jewish attorney named Schiff, who has been sent by the Department of the Interior to set up an internment camp for Japanese Americans in a desiccated former apple orchard adjacent to Rocky’s turf in Lone Pine, California; and Sunny, Rocky’s spirited daughter, a fiercely talented, mostly self-taught chef with whom Schiff falls in love. Wiggins’ interwoven plotlines—propelled here by romantic and there by familial love—and colorful characters are entrancing and as cinematic as the real-life Westerns that were filmed in the valley in which the book is primarily set. But what makes the novel soar is the way Wiggins can evoke landscapes both interior and exterior, especially the expansive valley that has come to exemplify America’s best qualities—and its worst.

This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way.