Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

Published by Harper on March 31, 2020

Valentine is a close study of female characters in or near Odessa, Texas, during the oil boom of the 1970s. With one or two exceptions, men play a limited role; they work and get drunk and behave badly with women. Men in Odessa die from accidents and drugs; women die because they are killed by men. “You raise a family in Midland, but you raise hell in Odessa.”

Suzanne Ledbetter scolds her daughter for crying when she hurls her baton into the air and it falls on her eye. Never let them see you cry, she says. Suzanne peddles Avon and Tupperware because she refuses to be judged in the way the city judges its poor residents. When she dies, she wants people to say that she was “a clever businesswoman, that she toed the line.” Suzanne copes by taking what she can get while avoiding public confrontation of the forces that keep her in her place. Her pride is all that matters.

Karla Sibley is 17 and bone tired because her baby still won’t sleep through the night. She works at a restaurant where male customers complain that she never smiles. When Dale Strickland makes a drunken effort to punch her, the female owner tells her not to overreact because “we don’t want anybody reaching for his gun.” Maybe the other customers will kick Strickland around in the parking lot to teach him a lesson (or just for fun), but he’ll be back. The other waitresses think how nice it must be for Strickland and his kind “to move through the world knowing everything will work out for them in the end.”

Mary Rose Whitehead’s jaundiced view of men is confirmed when a 14-year-old girl named Glory Ramirez flees Strickland after he rapes her. Glory takes shelter in Mary Rose’s home while Mary Rose faces down Strickland with a rifle she’s not sure is loaded. Mary Rose becomes the victim of the racist locals who threaten and malign her for testifying against Strickland. She despises the members of the Ladies Guild who stand behind Strickland and regard Glory as a slut because she's poor and Mexican. When Mary Rose testifies, the male judge is condescending and the defense attorney argues to all-male jury that the rape was just a misunderstanding. Mary Rose’s experiences with men are so disturbing that she ultimately can’t distinguish men who are evil from those who are harmless. She is surprised to learn “how easy it is to become the thing you most hate, or fear.” How her experience will affect her judgment is a question that underlies the novel’s best and most suspenseful scene.

In a moment of crisis, Corrine Shepard thinks “that she is an old woman completely unprepared to stop the world from coming apart at the seams.” As Corrine listens to men at the country club bemoan the loss of “their war against chaos and degeneracy” that followed Nixon’s resignation, she thinks men are the same everywhere. “She figured she could parachute into Antarctica in the dead of night, and she’d find three or four men sitting around a fire, filling each other’s heads with bullshit, fighting over who got to hold the fire poker.” The exception in Corrine’s experience was her husband Potter, but he died. Every night after his death she drinks too much, then sits in Potter’s truck, garage door closed, wishing she had the nerve to start the engine and end her life. The one time she did start the engine, Debra Ann, a pesky neighborhood child, opened the garage door to ask one of her unending questions.

Debra Ann's mother, Ginny Pierce, intended to come back for Debra Ann after she left Odessa, but never stopped for long in any one place. Debra Ann fills her life with imaginary friends until she discovers a real one, a gentle man who lives in a drainpipe. She provides a necessary balance to the novel, both in her innocent refusal to view all men as evil and by reminding women that they are the compassionate gender, the ones who help and forgive. But maybe that’s not true of all the women in Odessa. The novel suggests that some women react to violence by saying enough is enough.

Valentine is in part a story about the value of empathy for those who suffer, and of responding to wrath with mercy. But it is primarily a story of the emotional and physical pain that women endure at the hands of men, particularly in places where women are not valued as equals, where men make all the rules.

Elizabeth Wetmore captures a setting that is dry and dusty, a place that would have nothing if it didn’t have oil. Men come for work, live in “man camps,” and only stay until the boom ends, when they move on and leave the women behind. Wetmore repeats some of the local jokes about Odessa near the novel's end. The jokes are ugly, like the landscape, reflecting the bleak, unjust, and humorless life that the female characters endure.

Valentine is tense and depressing, but Wetmore’s surehanded prose tells a moving story that never becomes sentimental. It derives power from its avoidance of melodrama. Life is hard and for some of the characters, it is unlikely to ever be better. The female characters differ in age and ancestry, but they share an understanding, if not an acceptance, of their vulnerability in a harsh male world. Still, at least one character offers a message of hope, an unwillingness to be satisfied with survival, a determination to shape her own fate. The opportunity to understand and care about the diverse lives of these complex women makes Valentine a novel that will bear rereading.

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