Valentine

“Why did God give oil to West Texas? To make up for what He did to the land” (273). Even the residents joke about the cheerless landscape of West Texas. One can easily dismiss this setting as a postmodern manifestation of an Old Testament wasteland. Ginny, D.A.’s mother, who flees her life in Odessa and drives until she hits Nevada, takes with her on her flight a stack of art books she checked out of the library just to see something, anything, beautiful. The Permian Basin is one of North America’s largest oil fields, just under the size of the state of Utah. For the residents of Wetmore’s Odessa, ever since the first oil gusher was discovered in 1920 (an event that some residents still remember), the oil fields represent both economic stability and a nervous apprehension over the inevitable tapping out of the deposits, the boom and bust cycle of oil fields. As Odessa’s residents are oddly proud to claim, the town “is three hundred miles from everywhere” (217). Other than the oil field, the Permian Basin emerges as a symbolic landscape that suggests the characters’ ironic struggle to find beauty.