A review of Valentine <\/em>by West Texas native Elizabeth Wetmore<\/p>\n

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\u201cPeople think it\u2019s all snakes and scorpions out there in the oil patch, but hell, those are the most harmless things in the county.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cSunday morning begins . . . with a young roughneck stretched out and sleeping hard in his pickup . . . His cowboy hat is pulled down far enough that the girl sitting outside on the dusty ground can see only his pale jaw, freckled and nearly hairless, a face that will never need a daily shave, no matter how old he gets, but she is hoping he dies young.\u201d In the light of day, Gloria Ram\u00edrez can just make out a road leading to a ranch house. She can also see the roughneck\u2019s skin and blood under her fingernails. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The rape of fourteen-year-old Gloria by an Anglo man in the upper reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert just outside Odessa, Texas, in 1976 divides the town, husbands from wives, children from parents, faithful from faithful, friends from friends. As soon as Mary Rose Whitehead opens her ranch-house door to Gloria\u2019s knock that morning after Valentine\u2019s Day, her life is irrevocably altered. After this day, Gloria will insist on being called \u201cGlory\u201d because she can only hear her name in the rapist\u2019s voice.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Valentine <\/span><\/span><\/em>is the new book from West Texas native Elizabeth Wetmore. Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review<\/em>, Colorado Review<\/em>, Iowa Review<\/em>, and other literary journals. A dazzling debut, Valentine <\/em>sets the hook in the first paragraph, catching firmly in the soft meat of your mouth, impossible to spit out. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Wetmore employs multiple characters and points of view to narrate her story, from the victim to the ranch wife to the residents of the neighborhood in Odessa to which she moves. The pace is almost languorous in places, as Wetmore interrupts her plot to present her characters\u2019 backstories, but she uses this device to convey community reaction, and you won\u2019t mind as these women and girls come alive on the page. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The horrific assault functions as the vehicle for Wetmore\u2019s examination of the place of women, these strivers and survivors so restless within their boundaries, in a particular time and place, with its casual racism and sexism (\u201cI look at [the jury] too and realize with a start that there are only two women in the room\u2014[the court reporter] and me. We don\u2019t belong here, I think. This room isn\u2019t for us.\u201d), hypocrisy, compromises, moral choices, and what happens when you are sick to death of bending. You\u2019ll want to shake some of them, hug others, and sometimes you\u2019ll want to stand and applaud. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Wetmore does accelerate toward the climax, as a months-long drought is broken by powerful storms, and your heart rate will speed up along with it, red dirt turning the sky pink and orange, thunderstorms the color of old bruises and ripe plums. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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In precise, stark, economical language, Wetmore conjures menace as well as an ironic, sometimes acerbic, humor (\u201cHe\u2019s a snake. If you turned the air conditioner up high enough, his heart rate would plummet.\u201d). Glory\u2019s detachment (\u201c. . . this body\u2014yesterday, she would have called it mine<\/em>\u201d) in the rape\u2019s immediate aftermath is deftly, painfully rendered. A small mercy: Wetmore never details the rape, but it\u2019s a gut punch when she almost offhandedly mentions that Glory\u2019s spleen had to be removed.  <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Summer in Odessa: \u201cThe day is lit up like an interrogation room, the sun a fierce bulb in an otherwise empty sky.\u201d I feel this place viscerally, can see every location in my mind\u2019s eye, having lived in Odessa between the ages of eight and sixteen. I was at the Elvis concert referenced in Valentine<\/em>, watched the first Star Wars <\/em>movie at the drive-in in 1977, visited that bookmobile, abandoned my younger cousin on a street corner (pursuing the Pied Piper music of the ice cream truck on a blisteringly hot summer day\u2014I got into trouble for that) in the very neighborhood where Mary Rose rents a house. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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In literature, birds usually symbolize freedom; most of the birds in Valentine <\/em>are dead, stalked by a feral cat, which carries double meanings in symbolism, light and dark, rest and action, as well as patience, independence, and courage. The women in Valentine <\/em>are a contradictory lot but ultimately, they are cats, not birds. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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