1976 Odessa, Texas. The book begins with a rape of young 14-year-old girl, Gloria Ramirez, by an older white man, Dale Strickland, the son of a preacher, who bears no remorse for what he's done. Subsequent chapters trace the aftermath, but rather than focusing solely on Gloria's story, this book tells five separate stories, of five women, loosely connected by life but caught in the same painful, stifling misery. Some reviewers didn't like the constant shifting among the five women narrators, but to me it suggested their fate was inescapable; every woman, not just one or two, experienced pain with a different source. The only help for it was to grab the car keys and drive out of town because the brutality in Odessa is pervasive and systemic, tainting every aspect of life.
In Wetmore's hands, oil is at once the source of material wealth and a metaphor for the darkness, the crudeness that is inheres in very bedrock of the town. At one point, the oil erupts from a new well, completely out of control, stinking and sliming across the ground, blackening the land and smothering through slow death all the plants in its way. So here, the football players suffer concussions--"they have their bell rung a little"--and keep on playing. Pastor Rob preaches the evils of desegregation: it's like "locking a cow, a mountain lion, and a possum in the same barn together, then being surprised when somebody gets eaten." And a white man who rapes a Hispanic girl gets away with it. The few attempts at kindness--the young girl DA trying to help a Vietnam veteran, a woman testifying on Gloria's behalf--end badly, with vicious threats and near-fatal consequences.
My one difficulty with the book is that while circumstances change--Mary Rose moves off her ranch and into town; Glory leaves Texas for Mexico with her uncle--I didn't find that the characters change. That is, there's change but not much, if any, evidence of psychological growth, and I look for that in a book. That said, Wetmore has built a dark world and a relentlessly harrowing tale, with language that is strong and poetic. I'll be interested to see what she writes next.
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