The action develops in the mid-1970s - the main character, a resident of Texas Odessa, discovers a beaten and raped girl on her doorstep. She becomes a witness in the case against a young white oil worker - but this does not suit all of her neighbors. Wetmore has a veritable polyphonic, complex American novel - and here's why.
"Here is a person who is, and must always be, what the whole world was made for, and without whom that same world becomes unimaginable."
The main genre for the entire twentieth century, the genre of the "great American novel", traditionally lying at the junction of acute sociality and naked personality, in recent years has almost left the literary proscenium. It seems that masters such as Jonathan Franzen, Richard Russo and Philip Mayer are responsible for maintaining the glorious traditions of William Faulkner and John Steinbeck in contemporary American prose. It is all the more pleasant (and perhaps surprising) to meet the ideal, full-blooded "great American novel" by a debutante: in her sensational first book "Valentine," the Texas native Elizabeth Wetmore not only mechanically reproduces the respectable canon, but reinterprets it, updates it and returns it to the reader happily and harmoniously renewed.
One morning in 1976, twenty-six-year-old Mary Rose, the mother of a nine-year-old daughter, who is preparing to give birth to another child, opens the door of her secluded ranch near the city of Odessa and finds fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramirez on her doorstep, barefoot and bloodied. The night before, on Valentine's Day, Gloria (the daughter of an illegal migrant from Mexico, dropped out of school, smokes, drinks, begs for trouble) got into the car with an unfamiliar white oil guy who drove her into the wilderness, raped her all night, and then brutally beat up. And this event becomes a semantic axis around which at first slowly, but gradually accelerating, the world of Elizabeth Wetmore's novel revolves.
Mary Rose prepares to testify in court against the rapist, and becomes the object of harassment from neighbors - many people think that the raped girl is to blame for what happened, and one should not ruin the reputation of a good guy because of a stupid misunderstanding. Neighbor Mary Rose, seventy-year-old madcap Corinne (in her generation it was enough to return to work after marriage and childbirth to acquire such a reputation) drowns her grief in whiskey over the recent death of her husband. A homeless neighbor girl, nine-year-old Debra Ann (her father works all day in an oil field, her mother just ran away in an unknown direction, leaving her husband and daughter) is trying to somehow survive and comprehend her loss, and along the way begins to take care of the young vagabond living in a ditch, only that returned from the Vietnam War. Suzanne, Corinne's boring and tiresomely impeccable neighbor, hides an ineradicable fear of poverty and rejection under the glossy guise of Olympic arrogance, from which she scrambled with colossal difficulty in her time. And Gloria Ramirez, hiding in a country motel under the supervision of her uncle, grows hair on her shaved head and tries to collect her life from those fragments that she turned into overnight.
A dozen destinies, intertwining, branching, unwinding at once into the past and into the future, all together add up to a real epic from the life of women in Texas and, more broadly, in America of the twentieth century. Early unwanted marriages (pregnancy at seventeen - and all life was in vain), humiliating dependence on husbands, loneliness, first imposed, and then successfully assimilated hypocrisy, actually legalized sexual abuse (“Do you know who a virgin in Lake Charles is? - Twelve-year-old freak who can run fast ”), the inability to earn money and make a career on their own. All this gloomy feminist set of Wetmore colors with the problems of racism (Odessa society almost unanimously takes the side of the rapist, because his victim is just "some Mexican") and ecology (the oil boom, so beneficial and invigorating for the economy, literally kills the withered Texas land). In short, the only thing missing is the discussion of climate change in order to assemble a left-liberal thematic bingo that invariably outrages Russian fighters with the so-called "American agenda."
However - and this is the uniqueness of Elizabeth Wetmore - from the very “agenda”, exaggerated actual litter, she manages to sprout something amazingly natural, alive and beautiful. What others would have boiled down to a banal and straightforward ideological imperative, in her performance is overgrown with semitones, filled with complexity, nagging detail, unconditional reliability and depth. The relevance of Wetmore's novel is the result of an unconscious desire to fit into the trend, but a rare and therefore especially valuable coincidence of social demand and lively personal concern. And it is this ability to directly experience the universal as personal, to respond with one's own hot emotion to global trends and allows us to put Valentine on a par with the best examples of the great American novel.
To translate Elizabeth Wetmore into Russian, Viktor Golyshev undertook - among his other indisputable merits, by a wide margin, the best translator of William Faulkner. And this choice is not accidental: in Wetmore's novel, references to Faulkner's novels sound quite distinctly (first of all, perhaps, to “When I Died” - from him “Valentine” inherited its polyphonic structure), Steinbeck (the entourage quite unambiguously refers to “ Grapes of Wrath ") and Harper Lee (the prosecutor trying to get the rapist guilty, as if mirroring the lawyer Atticus Finch, defending the black guy in" To Kill a Mockingbird "). Searching for and fixing these intersections, rhymes and parallels is a separate pleasure that Valentine will give its reader in full.
Yet the main point that can be drawn from Elizabeth Wetmore's literary debut is not about form or tradition, but the obvious fact that there are no bad topics - there are mediocre writers. A truly gifted author (such as Wetmore) can afford to choose any - however trivial and hackneyed - topic: he will still get something fresh and real.
This article was sponsored by Jakob Fricke.
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