Into the Valley
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Ruth Galm’s spare, poetic debut novel, set in the American West of early Joan Didion, traces the drifting path of a young woman as she skirts the law and her own oppressive anxiety.
Into the Valley opens on the day in July 1967 when B. decides to pass her first counterfeit check and flee San Francisco for the Central Valley. Caught between generations and unmarried at 30, B. doesn’t understand the new counterculture youths. She likes the dresses and kid gloves of her mother’s generation, but doesn’t fit into that world either.
B. is beset by a disintegrative anxiety she calls “the carsickness,” and the only relief comes in handling illicit checks and driving endlessly through the valley. As she travels the bare, anonymous landscape, meeting an array of other characters—an alcoholic professor, a bohemian teenage girl, a criminal admirer—B.’s flight becomes that of a woman unraveling, a person lost between who she is and who she cannot yet be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
