Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:

Desert of the Heart

by Jane Rule

Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

Disclaimer: Some of these reviews will contain spoilers. All were generated after discussing the books in a lesbian book group to which I belong. However, the opinions represented below are my own, and nobody else connected with the group should be held responsible for them.

So this month we read Jane Rule's classic lesbian romance Desert of the Heart, which in the mid 1980s was made into a classic lesbian movie called Desert Hearts. I finished the book yesterday just in time for us to watch the movie. Liza had seen the movie in college--one of her best friends was obsessed with Patricia Charbonneau, who plays the younger love interest--and she had always told me that I needed to watch it because although cheesy it was still pretty good compared to other lesbian film fare such as the execrable Claire of the Moon. So we ordered it from Netflix.

Whoa nelly.

The short story is: we were both surprised by how much we liked the book. Then, we were both astounded and horrified at how much, MUCH worse the movie was.

So, to back up and start with the novel: Desert of the Heart is set in Reno, Nevada in 1958. Basically as soon as Nevada became a state it was a place where you could go do things that were illegal in the rest of the country, and one of those things was get a divorce. If you lived in a state where it was much harder to get divorced, you could go out to Nevada, pretend you were going to live there indefinitely, and then get yourself divorced as a Nevada resident. So there was an entire industry devoted to helping women get divorced out there, including a network of "divorce ranches" catering to the women who needed a place to stay for the 6 weeks it took to establish residency. So, the novel starts with Evelyn Hall, who is an English professor at a university in California, coming out to Reno to stay in a boarding house for six weeks preparatory to divorcing her husband of 16 years. The boarding house is run by a woman named Frances, and its inmates include her son Walter and Ann Childs, who is not Frances's daughter but has been more or less raised by her because Ann's mother abandoned her when she was six and Ann's father eventually took up with Frances. Ann is about 15 years younger than Evelyn, and the first time Evelyn meets her she's in frontier drag because she works at a local casino as a "change apron." There is a strong physical resemblance between Ann and Evelyn which everyone finds uncanny, but the fact that people routinely assume they are mother and daughter when they see them together doesn't seem to bother them; in fact, it may well be one of the reasons that Ann and Evelyn fall for each other.

As Evelyn and Ann get more and more involved (physically and emotionally), various other subplots involving other characters play out in the boarding house and the casino. In fact, the way the book handles the setting is one of the main things that really lifts it out of the ordinary. Ann is fascinated by the emptiness and starkness of the desert, whereas Evelyn is initially terrified of it. Ann is also fascinated by the world of the casino, in part because she knows how destructive and nightmarish it is. Ann is an artist, and makes a lot of money on the side selling her cartoons to magazines and newspapers; the casino provides inspiration for her satire, which is balanced by a desire to "love the whole world" despite its pathetic turpitude. There's a passage toward the end when Ann is thinking about how to explain her fascination with the casino to Evelyn, in which she does this whole reading of gambling as the pure essence of human existence that is actually much more convincing and fascinating/creepy than it sounds.

This is actually not the first lesbian novel we've read in which gambling becomes an important metaphor for life/love; in Anshaw's Seven Moves the protagonist grew up helping her father cheat at cards, and gambling is all over Winterson's The Passion, wherein one of the major leitmotifs is "You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play." Desert of the Heart has a more pedestrian take on it: the casino, either out of a desire for good PR or because it's legally required to, posts placards explaining to all who enter its doors exactly what the odds are, one of which reads, "IF YOU PLAY LONG ENOUGH, YOU WILL LOSE."

My point is that although there is a lot of stuff in Desert of the Heart that I would have been much more patient with when I was a lot younger--Ann and Evelyn are both very intellectual and spend a lot of time having Deep Conversations--it really is a good little book with some weight and depth and a pretty satisfying and realistic romance involving two reasonably complex characters. It's true that Rule uses the elision method when writing her sex scenes, but you do know for sure that they are having sex. Rule is working a little too hard to make the book literary, perhaps; Evelyn is a Yeats fan, and tends to process things through allusion. The book's title is taken from the ending of W. H. Auden's elegy for Yeats:

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the desert of the heart
Let the healing fountain start;
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Later on, as she is first realizing her attraction to Ann, she quotes Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" (Yeats's daughter is also named Anne). There is also some discussion of "The Second Coming," "Among Schoolchildren," and "Sailing to Byzantium," but none of it is really going to interefere with the enjoyment of readers who won't get the allusions. So the book is definitely worth the time it takes to read, and you get a lot of neat little surprises. It's almost worth it, really, just for the depiction of the gambling industry in its relative youth.

OK, so with all this you'd think you could make a decent movie, right?

Wrong.

So very wrong.

OK, in case you ever need to make a really crappy film adaptation of a lesbian romance, here's how to follow the Donna Deitch Desert Hearts recipe:

  • Change all the characters' names for no apparent reason.

  • Make Frances, who in the novel is very supportive of Ann even though she doesn't feel she understands her, a homophobic, alcoholic drama queen who is so threatened by the Ann/Evelyn romance (sorry, in the movie they're called Cay and Vivian) that she publicly humiliates both of them and boots Vivian off the ranch.

  • Replace much of the stuff that goes on in the casino, and Evelyn and Ann's character development, with a lot of scenes in which Ann (sorry, Cay) rants to various bigoted adversaries about how people just have to accept her bad lesbian self the way she is, or else.

  • Make Evelyn--sorry, Vivian--a professor from Columbia, and harp on that constantly, but only in order to portray Vivian as an uptight snob who is secretly horrified by all the trashiness around her, and to have all the other (implicitly much trashier) characters alternately fawn over and resent her for being so much more 'quality' than they are.

  • Destroy the book's most sympathetic representation of bisexuality by turning Ann's pal and casual sex partner Silver into a Dolly Partonesque caricature of heterosexuality. (In the book, Silver does end up getting married to her live-in boyfriend, but she also remains involved with/possessive of Ann for the beginning of her relationship wtih Evelyn. The film never indicates that Silver has, as she says, "always had women" before and during her relationship with Joe.)

  • Delay the onset of the actual romance until about 90% of the way into the movie.

  • And last, and most important--make the writing for the romance as full of nasty cheese as you possibly can!

    I mean we were really, actually howling in pain through a lot of this movie. We kept watching just because we wanted to see how bad it was going to get. There is, very late in the film, one sex scene which is fairly long and really pretty good. But by that point, as Liza said, you are so fed up with both characters that you really can't enjoy it properly.

    In some ways, the contrast is interesting; for instance, the film production team obviously felt it was important to show a lot of societal rejection of Cay and Vivian; they also made Cay a lot more obviously out and Identified than Ann was. Along the same lines, Vivian has a lot more angst about getting into a lesbian relationship than Evelyn does; what worries Evelyn is not so much that Ann's a woman as that she's so much younger. So one thing that happened during the translation was that identity politics started to play a much larger role. Perhaps this has to do with what happened to poor Silver, who is reduced to a sort of younger, cuter version of Flo from Alice.

    Anyway, in summary: I recommend the book, but if you're gonna watch the movie, know what you're in for and come prepared.

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