Valentine

This is a novel about how to recover from a rape. Rape is not about sex or lust. Rape is about power and control, subjugation and domination, the denial of choice to another perceived as weak and vulnerable. As such, it represents the destruction of a person’s very self and identity. Just hours after her assault, as Gloria struggles to escape without waking up Dale, certain he will complete the job by killing her, she “wordlessly considers the pieces of her body as they appear to her. Arms. Here is an arm, a foot [...] And over there, on the ground next to the wooden drill platform, is her heart” (3). She is in pieces.

Without making rape a symbol—which would diminish the very real violence of a very real crime—in metaphoric ways each of the women who tell the novel’s stories have been similarly violated, similarly shattered, similarly left estranged from their own identities. In the end, the justice system isn’t capable of handling the implications of rape. Indeed, if the novel ended with Mary Rose’s disastrous testimony, then the novel would indeed offer a bleak assessment of women in a contemporary male-driven world.

However, the novel doesn’t end with Mary Rose in a jail cell while Dale skips out of the courthouse free. One by one, the women in the novel assert control over their lives, gather up the pieces they’ve left, and forge from those fragments a stronger person. Glory (who has left behind the name/identity of Gloria) decides as she heads home to her mother that her scars will heal, that looking back is counter-productive, and that her story will not be as a victim of rape but rather as the girl who heroically walked across two miles of dangerous open Texas oil country to secure her rescue; Mary Rose, destroyed by her experience in the courtroom, lowers the loaded rifle and understands that thoughtless vengeance is just that; Corrine resolves to not be content to float through whatever life she has left, wallowing in grief for the weak man who abandoned her; D.A., in the gentle and loving bath with Corrine, understands that she can’t wait for a mother who may not return, that yearning isn’t enough; and Karla, tired of the disrespect and verbal abuse of men, after dispensing a distinct kind of frontier justice to Dale Strickland, heads into a glorious sunrise to the tantalizing promise of life after Odessa with her infant daughter. The opposite of rape, then, is empowerment—the reclamation of the self and the determination to forge a newer, stronger identity. In recovering from their loss of identity, each of the women closes the novel stronger because of the experience, determined now to define their life narratives on their terms. 

Loneliness is the hobgoblin that haunts these characters. They feel an absence in their heart that makes their own lives seem somehow insufficient or lacking. Fittingly, the novel explores the difficult journey toward the redemptive possibilities of others by telling that story through a fragmented structure that, in the end, reveals the characters’ emotional recovery. The novel resists coherence. In some ways, it’s structurally more like a collection of interrelated short stories. Chapter to chapter, the point of view shifts, each chapter heading identifying the perspective. Events recur chapter to chapter—the rape and trial, for instance—but as point of view shifts, so does chronology and so does emphasis. Indeed, despite the riveting start focusing on Glory immediately after the rape, her character doesn’t return for more than 100 pages. Nevertheless, each chapter, in relating the narrative of a woman in Odessa, deepens the understanding of the rape’s emotional devastation. Glory is thus never entirely out of the narrative focus.

Each chapter shifts perspective. Mary Rose tells her own story in the intense intimacy of first person; others are rendered through the limited omniscience of a character. At times, the narrative action of 1976 is interrupted by the overarching authority who steps in to reveal a character’s future: In one instance, the chapter that shares the story of the waitress Karla, the narrative uses the collective we—the perspective of the serving crew at the diner who end up helping Karla secure her flight from Odessa. In addition, this dialogue lacks the conventional punctuation, so the voices themselves fuse into the unfolding plot.

This complicated perspective structuring is more than slick, gimmicky experimentation; it’s central to the novel’s themes. In shifting the perspective, in refusing to allow the chapters to link in a tidy and clean chronology, the fragments cohere only through readers’ diligent efforts. Thus, the readers, the characters, and the author create the harmony of plot. Much as each character in turn comes to understand the necessity of others, the strength of the individual persists (each chapter in its own integrity, each voice distinct, each perspective in abiding by the character’s limits), but only in coming together does the novel emerge. The complete story can be told only through a collective. No one chapter or character is sufficient. Perhaps the loneliest relationship of all—the author to the unnamable reader and that reader to the characters—is bridged. We connect the storylines. We hear the voices. We see the interrelated elements of the women’s lives. We are a part of, not apart from, the world of West Texas. 

With alarming frequency, the women—or, more precisely, the teenage girls—of West Texas find in the reality of pregnancy a cautionary tale—too late—about succumbing to the boredom and frustrations of their narrow lives and giving into sex to break the routine. Sex is thoughtless and instinctual. The connection between having sex and getting pregnant seems obscure to them. Indeed, the guidance counselor at the Odessa high school Mary Rose attends is all too accustomed to the protocols for handling girls who get pregnant. Pregnancy seems more of a trap than a blessing. Often, the girl explores the option of abortion to preserve her apartness and avoid the endgame commitment to a loveless marriage. Families quickly cobble together some kind of wedding to legitimize the baby, and the woman is expected to embrace the role of mother. Sex is a predatory hunt, a strategy for capture and confinement. Pregnancy is a mistake, a problem—and abortion, medical or homeopathic, seems (at least at first) the common-sense solution.

Ginny tries valiantly to accept her role as D.A.’s mother after getting “knocked up” (115). She can’t understand why, day after grinding day for more than 10 years, the reward of motherhood fails to register. While she was growing up, her grandmother, a veteran of life in West Texas, told her the lurid stories of women who couldn’t find sufficient purpose in the conventional rewards of marriage and family: a mother who walked out into a blizzard rather than stay with her family; another who hanged herself after serving dinner, not bothering to wash the dishes. The stories are “bright and enduring, as if somebody took a branding iron and seared them into Ginny’s memory” (85). By contrast, the prim, tightly wound Suzanne Ledbetter assures her curvy teenage daughter that any boy coming near her would be redirected with a swing of a 2x4.

When pregnancy is the result of a man co-opting a woman’s life, the picture is bleak. Against those narratives, the novel balances the stories of women who grow into the role of mother: Corrine and her blooming friendship with D.A.; Glory in the end missing the mother she so carelessly fought with; and supremely, Mary Rose and her two children, who become her family after she makes her peace with the inequities of West Texas law. Ultimately, the novel embraces the bond between mother and daughter; the only sons in the novel are the cavalcade of weak, misogynistic men who invade and deform women’s lives with cavalier indifference. Grandmother/mother/daughter, even surrogate mother/daughters, relationships all emerge as an expression of profound emotional solidarity and caring empathy.