Odessa in West Texas, you wouldn't want to hang dead over the fence there.

Heat, dust, sandstorms, desert, oil in the ground as God's reparation for this planning error.

A booming city in the 1970s, twelve thousand new residents within a decade: oil workers who, like prospectors, are attracted by the prospect of quick money, plus illegal Mexicans.

It's the law of the oil barons.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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Not a good environment for women and children.

The underage Mexican Gloria Ramírez also has to experience this when she gets into a pickup truck with a white man.

A rape several hours later, she staggers towards a farm, pursued by her tormentor.

On the porch—a farmer's wife with a gun.

Mary Rose Whitehead saves the girl's life, keeps that Dale Strickland at bay until the police arrive.

And that puts you in trouble.

That's not how things work here.

"What do you call a single mother who has to get up early in the morning?

Pupil."

He made it look like a hunting accident

So much for the initial situation in Elizabeth Wetmore's debut novel "Valentine" (2020), which in Eva Bonné's stylish translation bears the lyrical title "We Are This Dust", alluding to a line by Larry Levis.

The now fifty-three-year-old author turned her back on her hometown of Odessa at the age of eighteen. Now she is anchoring the oil city on the literary map of the world with a bone-dry, burned-out novel.

Like many novels of those crime boom years, Wetmore doesn't bother with genre conventions;

after all, the state power still appears, but their unwillingness is clear: the order should not be changed.

That remains the task of a handful of women, whose profiles Wetmore develops with close inspection, refinement and empathy.

In addition to Glory, as the girl calls herself after the rape, and Mary Rose, this is above all the neighbor Corrine Shepard, who lost her husband Potter a few weeks before she met Mary Rose.

The former Air Force soldier, who never boarded a plane again, shot himself to avoid dying of cancer.

He made it look like a hunting accident so Corrine could collect life insurance.

The widow drowns her pain in bourbon.

A tough resistance develops

There is feral girl Debra Ann Pierce, abandoned by her mother Ginny, who tracks down a traumatized war veteran named Jesse.

He works as a factotum in a "tit bar," living in a concrete tube, until he earns enough money to return home to Tennessee.

The rapist, a pastor's son from Arkansas, lives quite unashamedly as a "good boy" who can't hurt a fly.

In Odessa, the way to death is distinguished by gender.

Men die in fights, from gas leaks and from explosions, from drunk crossing tracks or from falling from cooling towers.

"Women die when they get cancer or marry the wrong person or get in the car with strange men." This mechanism is disrupted by the Gloria Ramírez case.

A tenacious resistance develops, hardly noticeable at first.

There are the waitresses, for example, who know that Strickland is a pervert who likes brunettes.

Meanwhile, Glory's uncle Victor hides her niece, who has been battered in body and soul, in a motel while they await the day of the trial.

Elizabeth Wetmore does not treat women kindly, showing them as broken figures, with remnants of dignity and resistance, who are looking for a way out, far away from social discourses: Washington is far away, and after Watergate there is trust in politics destroyed anyway.

The fact that this does not become a black and white literary painting is thanks to the expressiveness of the author, although she also uses the historical present tense used in the epidemic.

How confidently Wetmore avoids clichés makes her novel remarkable.

It is rooted in contemporary history, but thanks to its powerfully eloquent images it reaches beyond time.

Elizabeth Wetmore: "We Are That Dust".

Novel.

Translated from the English by Eva Bonné.

Eichborn-Verlag, Cologne 2021. 319 p., hardcover, 22 euros.