‘Lone Women’ by Victor Lavalle    (2023) – 275 pages

There is a fine line between the highly imaginative and the preposterous. For me, ‘Lone Women’ crossed that line in many ways. I prefer my fiction to be at least grounded in some reality, to express some truth. However ‘Lone Women’ is nearly entirely far-fetched and preposterous. It is also filled with gratuitous violence.

At the beginning of ‘Lone Women’, young black woman Adelaide Henry is dumping gasoline all over her parents farmhouse in southern California and setting it on fire, then heading out to a town called Big Sandy in northern Montana. The year is 1915. In the sparsely populated Montana of that time, even a lone woman can acquire a homestead there for free if she can work the land and survive for three years.

“This land overpowered people, but it hadn’t come to them, they had come to it. It wasn’t trying to kill them; it didn’t even notice them.”

Wherever Adelaide goes, she takes her enormous old heavy trunk. What’s in the trunk? I won’t tell.

I will have difficulty describing the basic absurdity of ‘Lone Women’ without giving away plot secrets, and I won’t give away any plot secrets, so just take my words for it. ‘Lone Women’ is preposterous. I suspect that for many other readers that is part of the fun of the novel. The reviewer for the New York Times found ‘Lone Women’ “almost impossible to put down”. I did not have that problem.

The whole idea of a single woman going to Montana and somehow clearing the land and working it is difficult to accept, but she does have neighbors who help her.

“When people need each other, they find ways to be good,” Mr. Olsen told her. “I wish I could say better of the human animal, but I can’t.”

However, rather than becoming a realistic western story, ‘Lone Women’ becomes an unbelievable gruesome tale of horror.

The ridiculous plot did hold my interest, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on it. I suspect for many readers, the more ridiculous the better.

Grade:   C