Into The Valley

(Paperback)

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Description

Into The Valley opens on the day in July 1967 when B. decides to pass her first counterfeit cheque and flee San Francisco. B. is caught between generations - unmarried at 30, she doesn't understand the new counterculture youths, but never fit into her mother's world either. The only relief comes in handling the illicit checks and endless driving in the valley. As she travels the bare, anonymous landscape, meeting an array of other characters - an alcoholic professor, a hippie, a criminal admirer - B.'s flight becomes that of a woman unravelling.

Reviews

Praise for Into the Valley

"Mesmerizing . . . Galm's writing mimics the hyperreality of dreams, and the novel's penetrative heat is palpable . . . UnderpinningInto the Valleyis 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 LessingsThe Golden Notebook, has powerfully captured a womans 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

Galms 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 Galms hyper-vigilant and engrossing debut novel,Into the Valley, is both unsettling and, ultimately, victorious. From this novels simple opening sentence to its concise, shocking and surprising conclusion, it is a gorgeous, lyrical meditation... brilliantly drawn."
Cincinnati CityBeat

"Into the Valleyis highly visual, suspenseful and appropriately grim. Galms prose knows exactly where its 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."
ShelfAwareness

"Galms debut is precisely written and casually paced. A standout debut."
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

This is a natural for anyone who loves Joan Didions workespecially 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 Didions 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

Author Bio

Ruth Galm was born and raised in San Jose, California, earned an MFA from Columbia University, and has lived in San Francisco ever since. Her short fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, and Joyland, and she is a past resident of the Ucross Foundation. Into the Valley is her first novel.