Hey there, Valentine. His words took the ugly right out of the drive-in, his soft drawl marking him as not from here, but not that far away either. Gloria’s mouth went dry as a stick of chalk. She was standing next to the lone picnic table, a shaky wooden hub in the midst of a few cars and trucks, doing what she always did on a Saturday night. Hanging around, drinking limeades and begging smokes, waiting for something to happen, which it never did, not in this piss-ant town.
For a novel that starts in the aftermath of a brutal attack on a young girl, I found Valentine to be nearly completely devoid of emotional impact. When I learned that author Elizabeth Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, that explained everything to me: what is it about that program that teaches writers to overwork a story until all the juice is drained out of it? This is a decent expose of West Texas culture in the late 70’s (and as Wetmore herself grew up in Odessa where the novel is set, I’ll assume this is a fair rendering), but very little here really spoke to me. I guess we'll see what book club makes of this one.
When the time comes and I am called to take the stand, I will testify that I was the first person to see Gloria Ramírez alive. That poor girl, I will tell them. I don’t know how a child comes back from something like this.
I will say that the opening to Valentine is propulsive: Fourteen-year-old Mexican-American Gloria, beaten and violated, decides to make a break from her sleeping attacker as soon as the sun breaks the horizon. Spying a farmhouse in the distance, Gloria crosses the brambly desert barefoot, barely summoning the energy to knock on the home’s door when she finally arrives. The next chapter is from the POV of twenty-six-year-old Mary Rose — heavily pregnant and home alone with her nine-year-old daughter — as she opens the door to Gloria and then stares down the dangerous-looking young man who comes speeding up in his truck to fetch his “girlfriend”. These two chapters gave me a strong impression about what this book would be about, but that impression was wrong: Instead of focussing on how Gloria survives the attack or ramping up to a big trial sequence, POV will rotate between four more girls and women, some of them not connected at all to the initiating event. This does serve to give a good overview of the time and place (and especially the racism and misogyny that Gloria’s attack brings to the surface of they who would otherwise think of themselves as decent people), but everything feels superficial; more wide than deep.
At one point, a retired teacher (Corinne, whose story of her life with her recently departed husband was very sweet) states “Stories can save your life”, and that’s pretty much the central premise of Valentine. Everyone is always telling stories, of other times and other places, and if life in Odessa sounds hard in the present, it was worse before (and if a woman in the past didn’t kill herself when times got real tough, she was probably a witch.) With an unending drought and the price of cattle falling, life in Odessa is hard for the men:
We lose the men when they try to beat the train and their pickup trucks stall on the tracks, or they get drunk and accidentally shoot themselves, or they get drunk and climb the water tower and fall ten stories to their deaths. During cutting season, when they stumble in the chute and a bull calf roars and kicks them in the heart. On fishing trips, when they drown in the lake or fall asleep at the wheel on the drive home. Pile-up on the interstate, shooting at the Dixie Motel, hydrogen sulfide leak outside Gardendale. Looks like somebody came down with a fatal case of the stupid, Evelyn says when one of the regulars shares the news at happy hour. Those are the usual ways, the ordinary days, but now it is the first of September and the Bone Springs shale is coming back into play. Now we will also lose them to crystal and coke and painkillers. We will lose them to slipped drill bits or unsecured stacks of pipeline or fires caused by vapor clouds. And the women, how do we lose them? Usually, it’s when one of the men kills them.
Between supporting their men, constantly sweeping the red dust out of the corners of their homes, and keeping their lipstick fresh under the critical gaze of their fellow women, life is hard in Odessa for the ladies, too:
When I ask myself what is lost between Robert and me, Mary Rose paused and looked at her hands, turned them over and over. Well. How would I even know? Shit, I got my first cheerleading outfit when I was still in diapers. All of us did. If we were lucky, we made it to twelve before some man or boy, or well-intentioned woman who just thought we ought to know the score, let us know why we were put on this earth. To cheer them on. To smile and bring a little sunshine into the room. To prop them up and know them, and be nice to everybody we meet. I married Robert when I was seventeen years old, went straight from my father’s house to his. Mary Rose sat down on a lawn chair and leaned her head against the patio table and began to cry. Is this what I’m supposed to do? she said. Cheer him on?
Harder still is life for Gloria: Although born in Texas, popular opinion in Odessa in the wake of the attack is that Mexican girls grow up quicker; if Dale never asked her age and she got into his truck willingly, the locals muse, how is she not responsible for everything that happened to her? (And although I understand Wetmore’s thinking behind using this particular attack to explore racism and misogyny in Odessa, I’m left feeling a bit uncomfortable that Valentine isn’t really Gloria’s story in the end; the subject and the character that Wetmore created both deserved better.) Standing with dignity in the face of racial slurs — hurled by neighbours, lawyers, a kid at the pool — Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Odessa have it the hardest of all:
There are a dozen stories Victor could tell his niece. So many! But tonight he can only think of the sad ones. Ancestors hanged from posts in downtown Brownsville, their wives and children fleeing to Matamoros to spend the rest of their lives looking across the river at land that had been in their families for six generations. Texas Rangers shooting Mexican farmers in the backs as the men harvested sugar cane, or tying men to mesquite trees and setting them on fire, or forcing broken beer bottles down their throats. They did it for fun, Victor could tell her. They did it on a bet. They did it because they were drunk, or they hated Mexicans, or they heard a rumor that the Mexicans were teaming up with some freedmen or what was left of the Comanche, and they were all coming for the white settlers’ land, their wives and their daughters. And maybe sometimes they did it because they knew they were guilty, and having already traveled so far down the path of their own iniquity, they figured they might as well see it through. But mostly, they did it because they could.
In the Afterword, Wetmore writes that two of the chapters had been previously published as short stories, and the rotating POV gives this whole thing the feel of a short story collection connected by the town of Odessa, not by the attack. Which is fine: I could have emotionally connected to a novel based on Gloria’s experience — even one that rotated between Gloria and Mary Rose — but Valentine tries to do too much, spreads the material far too thin, and leaves me feeling nothing at all.
