★ 06/15/2015
It’s 1967, and 30-year-old B. has moved to San Francisco from Boston. To ease intense bouts of dizziness, she uses skills picked up from an on-again, off-again lover: she begins cashing counterfeit checks and buys a Mustang, then heads for California’s flat, desolate Central Valley, hoping the new, simpler surroundings will help curb her spells. B. wanders from town to town, meets locals, and contemplates a permanent move to these meeker environs. Yet as time passes, she finds that her “carsickness” (as she calls it) vanishes only when she is inside a bank, casually conning a teller out of hundreds of dollars. B.’s episodic encounters gel as the novel progresses—certain moments, particularly B.’s interaction with a lonesome college professor, provide memorable anchors—and she eventually takes on a teenage hippie as a companion, who questions the source of B.’s riches. Galm’s debut is precisely written and casually paced, and this works to the novel’s advantage, reinforcing the limitations of the rural areas B. encounters while acting as a strong contrast to scenes of counterfeiting, which B. grows increasingly dependent on. A standout debut. (Aug.)
Into the Valley
Narrated by Eliza Foss
Ruth GalmUnabridged — 6 hours, 31 minutes
Into the Valley
Narrated by Eliza Foss
Ruth GalmUnabridged — 6 hours, 31 minutes
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Overview
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Into the Valley
"Mesmerizing . . . Galm's writing mimics the hyperreality of dreams, and the novel's penetrative heat is palpable . . . Underpinning Into the Valley is a subtle and complicated exploration of what it means to be a woman and, more specifically, what it means to be a woman without a man."
—Elle Magazine
"Galm, in a similar fashion to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, has powerfully captured a woman’s righteous resistance in the face of a rapaciously gendered society."
—KQED Arts
"Evokes the desolate interior landscape of writers such as Joan Didion."
—San Jose Mercury News
“Galm’s writing here is vivid, and heavily atmospheric, with a derelict moodiness that draws the reader, too, into B.’s gradually oppressive carsickness.”
—Los Angeles Magazine
"Ruth Galm’s hyper-vigilant and engrossing debut novel, Into the Valley, is both unsettling and, ultimately, victorious. From this novel’s simple opening sentence to its concise, shocking and surprising conclusion, it is a gorgeous, lyrical meditation... brilliantly drawn."
—Cincinnati CityBeat
"Into the Valley is highly visual, suspenseful and appropriately grim. Galm’s prose knows exactly where it’s going, crisp and clear, it touches down lightly, like a small stone bounding down a scree slope . . . A solid, muscular piece of writing. It is skillfully whispered social commentary."
—High Country News
"An understated novel that explores the quiet but powerful emotions of loneliness and revelations that flow from losing one's way."
—Shelf Awareness
"Galm’s debut is precisely written and casually paced. A standout debut."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“This is a natural for anyone who loves Joan Didion’s work—especially her nonfiction critiques on California and that other classic of aimless driving, Play It as It Lays.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
"Ruth Galm has written a beautiful novel filled with poetic language . . . Truly mesmerizing."
—New York Journal of Books
"Galm's writing is rich and evokes the desolation of the Central Valley and B.'s mental state. Readers [will] appreciate Galm's fantastic writing and the new view of an overexposed slice of American history."
—Kirkus Reviews
"An existential meditation, ripe with symbolism and open for interpretation."
—Library Journal
“In the luxury vehicle of her hypnotically evocative prose, Ruth Galm takes us on the journey of the mysterious B., suffering from a mysterious malaise which can only be relieved by forging checks in cool, neutral banks. Like Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Into the Valley creates and recreates a wasted American landscape, and pulls us into a world whose emptiness has profound moral and social implications.”
—Mary Gordon
“Into the Valley is at once gorgeous and restrained; the character is herself a kind of vivid, shifting landscape, just as the landscape is itself a beguiling, dominating character. The result is an intensely emotional and human novel.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of American Innovations
“I reveled in a delicious state of unease reading Into the Valley, the parched atmosphere leaving me as dizzy as the protagonist, perfectly and simply known as ‘B.’ An enthralling, disturbing read, part Joan Didion and very much Patricia Highsmith, Galm stuns with this eerie, suspenseful ride of a novel. I loved this book.”
—Paula Bomer, author of Inside Madeleine
2015-06-25
A late 1960s road trip fueled by fake checks and real desperation.B. doesn't know exactly where she's going, but she's definitely leaving San Francisco. A nausea—"the carsickness"—that has haunted her for years has recently made her unable to function, and she's found that she only gets relief, temporarily, from passing counterfeit checks at local banks. Her trip meanders from town to town, punctuated by a new bank in each one, and is leavened only by the obsessive attention she pays to her appearance. B. is adrift not only in the Central Valley, but in life—she doesn't want to live like her mother, trapped beneath her hair and her girdle, but is also horrified by the counterculture girls who don't wear gloves and don't seem to know what a wash-and-set is. As the trip continues, B.'s attention to the trappings of femininity wanes, even as she reveres the way her dresses, nails, and makeup allow her to pass the checks she increasingly needs to keep her sanity. B. meets other people on her travels and is disappointed by every one—none can calm the restless carsickness, and in fact, she only feels worse as each day passes, even after reconnecting with the source of her fake checks. Galm's writing is rich and evokes the desolation of the Central Valley and B.'s mental state. B. is troubled but observant both of herself and her surroundings, and her observations form the bones of the novel as she unravels. Fittingly, the book ends indistinctly, still disentangling as she falls. Readers may be as confused and frustrated by B. as she is by herself, but they'll appreciate Galm's fantastic writing and the new view of an overexposed slice of American history.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940171256500 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The car was low on gas. She had not checked the gauge before leaving the lot and she flushed at the thought of the salesman making a joke of her. (No, she had not wanted a Chevy or a Chrysler. She knew this instinctively, although she might only have been able to say it was the look of the car. Something strong and sharp in the Mustang that pared it down to a single purpose, an inarguable direction. She'd never considered owning a car before. The subways and elevateds in the East had obviated any need, and perhaps, more importantly, owning her own car had seemed somehow unseemly. The women in advertisements lounged around cars in feather boas in the company of tuxedoed dates or carted bags of groceries to the back of a station wagon. And so she had tried to put the thought out of her mind, like some lurid afternoon fantasy, but the empirical beauty of the Mustang had stayed with her, and the car was the first thing she thought of after the check.)
There were no buildings in sight. The July heat made her arms and back sweat, moistening and drying and moistening again. Her left arm turned red in the sun. The city never got hot. Even on the warmest days, she shivered, her toes chilled. She wetted her dry lips and tried to put the anxiety about the gas out of her mind, and when she began to see the first rows of fruit trees, she turned into a dirt lane and parked.
Hundreds of peach trees. She rolled down her stockings and took off the bone-colored heels. The ground was dry and hard, the trees not high but in full leaf, crammed with hard orange peaches. She walked until she found a good spot to sit down. The tree was uncomfortable to lean against and the branches too low, so she lay all the way down on her back and tried to relax. A hot day in her childhood, she had snuck into a vacant lot and lay hidden and cooled in the overgrown grass, among the sounds of cars and birds and cicadas. She'd been convinced of the fact she was erased from the world and breathed easy and fallen asleep. She could not remember another day like that since.
She ate her candy bar, moving her tongue along her teeth for the chocolate and clumps of coconut, and pondered the sky through the peaches. Her throat was dry. She had nothing to drink. It was somewhere after one o'clock on a Tuesday and no cars passed. She tried to keep lying as she had in the vacant lot those years ago but the dirt was hard, and she was not hidden, and eventually she went back to the car and drove on.
She passed a horse corral. No people seemed to be around anywhere. The sun blazed on the animals, their heads bent under the heat, their bodies a liquid brown. They seemed to B., in their unconsciousness, in a state of total equanimity. After the horses came a stretch of dry, uncultivated land and then finally there was a gas station.
She filled up and went to the small bathroom at the back of the building. She saw that the whole back of her dress was dirty. The ivory had not been a wise decision, not for driving or sitting in the dirt, not for the second day of her period. Her underwear had spots of blood where her tampon bled through. She never paid enough attention to when her period might arrive and so was never prepared. And when it did come she seemed, irrationally, to disbelieve that it could require more than one or two tampons. That the blood would run on and on for so many days. She was invariably left with soiled underwear and bloody fingers. She took out the tampon and put another in and folded toilet paper over the blood spots. She went inside the store to pay for her gas, not touching the money in her bra. In her purse was a compact, a gold tube of lipstick, gum wrappers, aspirin, a few crumpled bills, and the checkbook.
A middle-aged woman with bleached hair looked at her blankly from the cash register.
"Do you have a water fountain?" B. asked the woman.
The woman did not acknowledge her question, just put down her magazine and went back behind a gray door and emerged with a paper cup of water.
"You on your way to Reno?" the woman asked.
"No."
The woman looked annoyed.
"Do you sell maps?" B. asked.
The woman flicked her chin toward the back of the store. B. walked to a revolving rack. She picked up a map of the state. "Do you have anything just for the valley?" she called to the woman.
"The 'valley'?" The woman frowned. "That's all we have over there."
By the time B. returned to the counter the annoyance had set into the woman's features and she pushed the change toward B. and went back to her magazine without looking up again.
B. laid the map across the passenger seat. Hundreds of black names on pastel. She'd only wanted a small patch to concentrate on, just a piece. She folded the map up. The heat in the car and the smells of hot metal and plastic drugged her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the square seat.
She must have fallen asleep because next the woman from the gas station was rapping at her windshield. "There's no loitering here," she said. "Can't just park all day at the pumps. We got other customers, you know."
B. rubbed her eyes. The woman glared at her. B. looked around; there were no other cars. "I'm sorry. I guess I was tired." The woman crossed her arms, the tanned skin draping.
"Is there a bank somewhere around?" B. asked.
"Go back to Suisun City or on to Rio Vista. There's nothin' in between."
For a moment B. thought the woman said something else under her breath. But the woman only continued to glare from behind the sagging arms and B. had no way of knowing if she was right.
When she came on Suisun City, the small main street and the pale tiled buildings were quaint but the marina behind the town startled B. Just like that, a row of boats in blue-brown water, masts bobbing against the flat yellow. She felt suddenly that the bay was following her, leaking out in a last menacing grab through the marsh stalks.
She jotted a random amount on the check.
"Good afternoon, ma'am." The pretty teller standing among the calm straight lines and muted oil paintings.
"It's 'miss' actually."
"Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am. I mean, miss."
But the cool expansive feeling still came. B. felt so light and cheerful afterward, she considered shaking the girl's hand, then thought better of it. As she walked back to the Mustang, the odd, misplaced marina did not disturb her in the least.
Back on the road the heat and sleepiness were too much. She searched for a motel and had to return to the freeway to find a motor inn with a billboard of a bikini-clad woman diving into a pool. B. did not turn on the air conditioner when she got inside the room, just let the heat melt over her as she lay on the bed.
She took the money out of her bra strap. It was now at least a dozen fifty-dollar bills; she had no interest in counting them. She rifled through the vinyl travel bag, pulling out for a moment the velvet box with the diamond brooch, then replacing it. Instead she took out a bottle of nail polish.
The room was darkening but she left off the light. She thought of nothing but smoothing the pale iridescent pink from the brush, of the nicely piquant smell. She'd watched her mother at her vanity making her toilette, the French word she'd taught B. for pinning her hair, applying her lipstick, dabbing a crystal perfume bottle at her neck. Each gesture accruing to her some invisible potency. Her mother had once given her the last tortoiseshell compact of her favorite face powder, a discontinued line, and B. kept it intact and untouched like a totem, unsure what might happen if she finished it.
When her nails were painted, B. lay down again with her palms flat against the bed and fell asleep.
She woke on her side, the nail polish fretted with lines from the bedspread. She had dreamed of the landscape from the car, the contourless vista, a stream of yellow and white and green with no signs of people, and in the dream she had decided she would follow this land forever.
CHAPTER 2The next morning the blood of her period had soaked through the toilet paper in her underwear. There was only the slightest brush of it on the inside of her dress. She hesitated to change. It was as if quitting the dress would disturb a key element to her new, fluid state. To bathe she sponged her armpits and her crotch and inserted a new tampon and put on new underwear. She threw the stockings from the day before in the trash, feeling vaguely guilty, but it was too hot. Then she worked on her face, the moisturizer and powder, the liquid liner at her eyes and the lipstick and perfume last. She pinned her hair back in place. There were young girls in the city now who let their hair go naturally, who never wore makeup, whose clothes were ill-fitting. These girls distressed B.
She'd forgotten a toothbrush. She walked from the motel toward a gas station. There was no town, only the motel (the pool in the daylight was small and chipped), a telephone booth, the gas station with a general store attached, and another street across the intersection. Her heels crunched in the pebbles along the road, the freeway cars moaning and thumping beside her. The morning sun already burned her shoulders. A watery-brown haze at the edge of the sky stung her eyes.
At the store, she bought a toothbrush and toothpaste, a doughnut and a cup of coffee.
"I'm just taking a tour of the valley," she found herself saying to the paunchy older man at the cash register. "I just thought it would be very interesting." She tried not to hear her own voice.
"Pretty hot time of year to choose." The man's neck was a loose pink.
"Well, I don't have anything pressing in town right now. Nothing I can't miss."
The man nodded as if this was clear and handed her the doughnut and paper cup.
As she drank the coffee in the shade of the building outside, she told herself there would be no police after her. What she'd done was not big or serious enough. And she was pretty. People had always seemed to like this. Her nose was aquiline, her lids heavy but eyes almond-shaped, this combination giving her, she'd been told, a bedroom quality. She had never experienced this quality but understood it appealed to people and so drew her eyeliner out to feline points at the sides of her eyes and kept her hair blonde. She was aware from the ballet lessons her mother had required that she moved with her shoulders down and neck long, which people also took to be ladylike and contented.
She walked across the intersection to the other street in the non-town. Two houses stood on it, one boarded up. The other was hidden by a wooden fence that when she peered inside was overrun with cacti. The cacti had clawed over a single arch of walkway to the door; everything else in the bramble dead and dry. A walnut tree bowed over the porch. The smell of dog feces baked in the sun, although no dog to be seen.
She opened the gate. (There were things she would not have done in the city: she'd wanted to enter a yard on one of the hills and peer into the mudroom at children's windbreakers on hooks and dirty sneakers lined up; she'd stopped herself.) She stooped under the cacti. The freeway blew; no dog barked. When she reached the door, she knocked without a clear reason. She had a sense the owner here lived alone, and she wanted to speak with him. She could tell the person she was new to the valley, ask for tips. The windows were layered in dust. She knocked again louder. On the porch under the windows was a collection: an enameled pot, several stones, tines of sharp antlers. B. glanced around. She slipped a small antler bone into her purse. For luck.
In the car, on the freeway, the non-town was already behind her. She tried to think of some current pop song, something fresh and summery to sing, but in truth she did not like the songs on the radio now. So she hummed her favorite parts from The King and I.
It was 1967. In the spring she had turned thirty.
CHAPTER 3B. had once watched a boy playing in a sandbox in the city. In a playground in her neighborhood, perched like all the playgrounds in the city, it seemed to her, precariously on a hill, as if it might fall off the side of the world. The mothers had been pretty in their makeup and scarves, their clipped, determined movements — hands darting in and out of a pram, through a small child's hair with leaves — admirable to B. But it was too draining to watch the women; they spoke too vehemently about items and opinions she did not understand. Her attention had settled instead on the boy. He poured the sand over his hand with such concentration, such absorption at the run of the dry grains on his fingers, that nothing else mattered, nothing else touched him. Only the feel of the sand on his skin and the keeping of its cascading rhythm. B. watched the boy until the mothers called him away, and after they'd gone she felt strangely abandoned, as if she should have spoken to him. She got up and looked around to make sure no one was watching and then sat in the sandbox. Following the boy's movements, she poured the sand over her hand, but she felt only the irritating papery sensation on her skin and when her knees began to ache from kneeling, she got up and left.
She decided that the checks were for her like the sand for the boy, and she did not let her mind go beyond this thought.
CHAPTER 4The radio announced a heat wave for the valley. B. could not imagine it any hotter. The back of the ivory sheath had sweat through and her limbs felt swollen; her hair had half slipped out of its pins. She stopped at a restaurant on an exit. She brought her large makeup case into the bathroom and powdered and fixed her hair and unzipped her dress to spray perfume underneath.
She ordered an iced tea from the waiter. The young man stared at her so intensely she wondered for a moment if she knew him from somewhere. She asked if he lived nearby, and he nodded without speaking. She remarked on the heat and he continued to stare until finally he said, "Ma'am, your zipper's undone."
She reached her hand to her back; her dress was flared open. "Oh. Thank you." She flushed to her neck. Her bra strap had fallen down her shoulder and she smelled her own odor still pungent under the perfume. She gripped the zipper awkwardly and pulled it up as far as she could. "Thank you," she mumbled. After he left, she pretended to study the menu with great absorption.
A woman with three small children was the only other customer in the place. She sat two tables over but kept staring at B. and the sky-blue makeup case. The woman looked old and childlike at the same time, small-boned, a high forehead with deep lines. She was wearing a sundress with a stain at the breast. In one arm she held a baby, while two young children ran back and forth from the window to the table, eating half a French fry and dropping it on the floor, sucking the juice off a pickle and putting it back. The woman sat like a statue in the midst of it.
"Do you live around here?" B. asked.
The woman's expression signaled the ridiculousness of the question. The baby squirmed. She hitched it higher and tighter on her lap without once glancing at it.
"I was just wondering if there was anything of interest to visit. For someone passing through."
The woman looked at B. as if she had asked for directions to China. A strand of thin hair fell across the lined forehead.
"There's Old Town, I guess," the woman said finally. "If you like the gold rush stuff. They have a railroad museum there, I think." One of the children ran by and shoved the baby. The baby smiled wildly as if it was a game and not an aggression.
"Oh, I won't be going to Sacramento, actually."
The woman seemed to accept this as understandable. "There's the buttes," she went on. "On the way to Chico. Those are sort of strange. Just strange to look at, out there all alone. But they don't let you drive in them. It's private land, I guess." She paused. "There's not much to see before Tahoe really."
"They sound lovely. Thank you."
B. absently fingered the handle of the makeup case.
"I'm from the city," B. added.
The mother nodded curtly as if to put a stop to this need to state the obvious. The baby was kicking its legs and whining. It tried again to scootch off her lap but the woman's grip seemed an insensate vice. The baby gave up and sank back into watching the children, trapped, mesmerized.
"You travelin' alone?" the woman asked.
"Yes."
"You lost or something?"
"No. Just driving. Just taking in the sights."
The mother picked up a French fry and swirled it in ketchup without eating it. "Well, I'd go directly on to Reno if I was you. There's nothing to see before Reno. A lot of driving gets me irritated."
The baby finally let out its wail then, sharp and steady. The mother hauled it to her shoulder and slapped it on the cheek, which only made the baby cry louder. Just then an adolescent boy opened the door of the restaurant and yelled, "We're parked in the back, he's waiting, come on!" The woman scooped up her purse and the baby and barked at the children to follow.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Into the Valley"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Ruth Galm.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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