Valentine One of Best Novels of 2020

Valentine: A Novel

By Elizabeth Wetmore

HarperCollins, 320 pages

★★★★★

Move aside Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurty, there’s a new gun in town and she looks at Texas with her rose-colored glasses left in the glove compartment. Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine is a stunning debut about hard truths and hard living in the unforgiving Permian Basin of West Texas. As one character describes it, it’s “eighty thousand square miles of the same old, same old….”

Lord Byron once wrote, “Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.” Okay, how does he feel about snakes? Wetmore’s West Texas is a place where everything thing that slithers can be found—often curled up by your kid’s bicycle—and three of ‘em are poisonous. Or five if we add Gila monsters and scorpions. Only pumpjacks and dusty towns break the monotony of a landscape whose human population is dominated by roughnecks, rednecks, sexual predators, drunks, and the desperate. Wetmore sets most of her story on or around Valentine’s Day. The year is 1976; oil and football are about the only reasons anyone would wish to be living in the recession-blasted town of Penwell, a strip of nothing southwest of Odessa and Midland.

The story unfolds when 14-year-old Gloria Ramirez gets in a truck with Dale Strickland. Before the evening is out, he brutalizes and rapes her. When he falls asleep, Gloria sneaks out and walks across several miles of desert scrubland to the nearest house, that of Mary Rose Whitehead. Mary Rose has a small daughter and another on the way. At first she doesn’t want to get involved, as her husband Robert is away tending their cattle and their home is remote. But when she sees what has been done to Gloria, she relents, calls the police, and even pulls a rifle on Dale when he comes looking for his “girlfriend.” Little does she know that her reluctant act of decency will tear apart her life and community.

The men of the area–including Robert–will themselves to believe Gloria deserved her fate; she willingly got in the truck, after all, and everyone knows that Mexican girls are promiscuous. They are sure that she simply had a bad case of buyer’s regret, and that Dale should apologize and everyone should move on. Even women at Mary Rose’s church feel this way. But Mary Rose knows better and isn’t going to play along. Things get so hot for her that she has to move into town as it’s unsafe on the ranch, a decision that leaves her further estranged from Robert.

Mary Rose’s neighbors are an interesting lot. There’s Corrine, a retired school teacher, grieving over her husband Potter’s death by pickling herself with booze; busybody Suzanne who leaves Corrine casseroles that she dumps in the garbage; and 11-year-old Debra Ann “D.A.” Pierce whose mother Ginny took off a few years ago–around Valentine’s Day, natch. D.A.’s dad works long hours in the oil fields and D.A. is practically feral, though she befriends and tries to help Jesse Belden. He is a Vietnam vet from Tennessee who is “skinny as ocotillo branches” and down on his luck. He lives in a drain pipe and appreciates the small gifts D.A. brings him.

To say that West Texas is hard on women–and this is very much a book told from a woman’s perspective–is an understatement. There are snakes, chiggers, tornadoes, sexism, and way too much religion. It’s a place where a girl considers herself lucky if she makes to 12 “before some man or boy, or well-intentioned woman” informs her why she was “put on this earth.” Violence is all around and those who can follow Ginny’s example and get out. Karla, a young waitress with a daughter, poses a riddle with a distressing answer: “What do you call a single mother who has to be up early in the morning? A sophomore.”

Valentine’s Day is harrowing and unforgettable. It is also unusual in that it has several endings, not just one. I’m usually unmoved by book jackets, but that of Valentine’s Day is perfect: sage brush, oil derricks, leaning telephone poles, ominous skies, and vast nothingness. Coyotes dare to prey in the desert, but they are the sinewy, skinny poor cousins of the kind of wolves Bryon had in mind. Wetmore’s West Texas is like a suburb of hell. I ran that metaphor past a good friend who lived in Texas. Her response: “You have no idea. That might be overly kind.”

I will take her at her word rather than checking out the area for myself. I will, however, heartily recommend that you check out Valentine. It is one of the best novels of 2020.

Rob Weir