Customer Reviews

Desert Of The Heart

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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As one reviewer said, if you expect the film to be exactly like the book, you'll be disappointed. However, it is a lyrical, complex book which demands much from the reader. It is not one of the lollypop romance books which now seem to be the norm. There is nothing wrong with lollypop but if you eat too much you get indigestion of the brain. This book, for me, resolved some observations I had made in the movie that didn't seem to make sense or seem right for the story and Rule justified my doubts about certain things. In the book, Evelyn (Vivien in the movie) is not so much uptight as unsure and conflicted and Ann (Kay in the movie) is much more complex. THere are subplots which are missing in the movie and I have no complaints with that because they would have taken away from the main story and would have made it much longer than it should be.You will find a big difference in the character of Frances that was portrayed in the movie. She too is much more complex. If you want to read a book which will engage your mind and soul, as well as your heart, then read Desert of the Heart. First rate.

I just finished re-reading Desert of the Heart, written by Jane Rule, for about the twentieth time. It is a remarkable, perfect little book. I have almost memorized certain lines and phrases, and I am certain that this work, all Jane Rule's work, has influenced my own. It says what it has to say, in the first paragraph, and it says it again in the rest of the book, and it ends just as it should.
"Conventions, like cliches, have a way of surviving their own usefulness. They are then defended or excused as the idioms of living." This is a book about the conventions we accept as the medium of our lives, most of us without questioning their real value to us. For some people, this makes life an absurdity devoid of meaning. People are born, grow up, go to school, get married, get jobs, raise children, and die. This book examines the absurdity of this idiom for some people. The convention of marriage, for homosexual people, is absurd. The cliche of fidelity and forsaking all others, for some, is meaningless, a promise impossible for humans to keep.

The story involves a woman who lived within these conventions all her life, even while feeling emotionally detached, outside them, as if she were speaking a foreign language. She meets another woman who has spent her life deliberately, consciously, living outside these conventions, even though studying them and the effects of trying to live within their boundaries. When these two women begin a relationship, one in defiance of those idioms of Iife, one accepting that their relationship may just be a visit outside the lines for her partner, the tension comes when each must acknowledge that what she thought about Iiving inside and outside those boundaries may not be true.
For Evelyn Hall, respectable college professor, stepping outside the conventions of her life forces her to examine them and question what she never before doubted, that women are supposed to marry, have children, and that she has failed because she played poorly at this game. She is forced to examine the basis for her assumptions about morality and love.
Ann Childs is forced to explore whether the cliches about love, the ones she has defied and dismissed all her life, might not hold some truth. If she accepts that she does love Evelyn, does that mean then that she must accept the other cliches about love that she has denied, that some of them might indeed be real and achievable, like fidelity, like "forsaking all others?"
There is an argument posed in the book about whether the human will or its nature influences us to choose or deny love. Is it our nature to marry men, bear children, and is it unnatural to seek love outside those accepted parameters? Is it our will, our intellect, that allows us to explore love outside the accepted convention of heterosexuality? Is it the will that bends us into the conventions of life, subduing our nature, which seeks out love wherever it may? Are those established conventions, old and worn, there to protect us from our nature or to bend our will away from our natural inclinations? If, in admitting and accepting her love for Ann, Evelyn is responding to her own nature, long denied, what does that say about the foundations on which her life was lived?

This is a small, short book, so well put together that I could not remove one line, one sentence, without unbalancing the whole. The movie that was based upon this book left out a great deal and added elements that are not there. Movies do that. Trying to remain true to the "theme" of the book, it completely re-routes characters, leaves out the very best lines, and substitutes some fine images and atmosphere. It is set in the early 1960's, and does a fine job of conveying the flavor of that period with the music and the fashions and the automobiles. Instead of portraying Ann Childs as an intellectual, in order to define her character as one who defies conventions, she is shown as rebellious and wild, promiscuous, and unaware of herself until she falls in love with Evelyn. Evelyn is shown as reserved and appalled at Ann's wildness, shocked, until she gives in to her own inner nature and makes love with Ann. This is not exactly how it played in the book, but the movie is also a short, fast story, and movies use shorthand methods. Movies can show us a person's character. Movies are defended by their makers by saying they remain true to the author's intent while engaging in wholesale restructuring. Movies can show us, in a single frame, what it takes a writer pages and pages to tell. So their defenders say.
I have no idea what Miss Rule thought of the movie they made from her first book. I believe she thought it was important, significant, that it get made. I believe she had no interest in assisting the makers. And the movie does hold true to the theme of accepting love in whatever form you find it, for its own sake. I find almost none of the original, beautiful lines from the book in the dialogue of the movie. I find none of the depth and elegance and artistry. Yet, on its own terms, the movie avoids some of the cliches one expects to find in a movie concerned with this topic. It does a good job of that. Even if some characters are made into caricatures, grotesque imitations of themselves, it can be forgiven because it is a movie. It has color and sound and movement. It can show us two women making love, something the author saw no reason to detail. It can show us Evelyn's transformation. It shows us things. That is what movies do.

I love this small, tight book. Jane Rule is a remarkable writer. If my own writing has been influenced by hers, consciously or unconsciously, I could find no other guide that would better suit me.

This is an extremely well written book, but if you're looking for it after seeing the movie, you might find it a bit different and unpalatable. The book has a cold and desolate feel which is apropriate for the way Rule goes with the story, and the writing is amazing, but it is not such a sweet love story as the movie, and Freud would have a ball with these two! There is much talk of the two women and a mother/daughter relationship which may offended some readers. Incidentally, the movie is actually "Desert Hearts" not "Desert of the heart" as the other reviewer mentioned, and they are both very different.

When I first read Rule's "Desert of The Heart" in the late 70's, there wasn't much else to read on the subject. Today, the book seems dated... much focus on shame and guilt, the characters ruminating frequently on society's insistence that women be married ladies, and such-like.

Thanks to the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, this book doesn't apply to a lot of us anymore. But, thank you, Jane Rule, for putting out a book that many people held dear at the time.... it was a little opening up of the questions that people needed to hear discussed back then.

A classic! Beautifully written, imaginative, and brave. If you know and love the movie "Desert of the Heart" - this is the original book, and its much, much better. Jane Rule was the pioneer for all of us. Read it, keep it, trade it, share it - its meant so much to so many lesbians, and we all need to bask in the glory. Order now!

I've been reading for over 30 years and I am not exaggerating that this is a terrific novel that should not be missed. There is as much depth in one chapter as you will get in entire novels. The writing simply flows and you don't put the book down until you notice the day has gone dark and lunch and dinner time have passed you by. Wonderful characters so rich in details they you wonder about them long after the novel ends.

Here is a description of the novel from the publishers web site - Evelyn Hall arrives in Reno wanting only to be left alone while she waits six weeks for a painful divorce from her husband. Once there she meets Ann Child - 15 years her junior, who is both a free spirit and a lesbian. Soon Ann refuses to let the controlled but vulnerable Evelyn ignore the powerful emotions that begin to unleash inside her... Immortalized for a whole new generation by the film Desert Hearts, Jane Rule's classic DESERT OF THE HEART is arguably her finest novel. Joyce Carol Oates called it "an intelligent and utterly believable novel". Told with all the wit and skill of this fine novelist, the book stands as a classic of lesbian literature.


I enjoyed it so much I bought the dvd!

I also went and bought the authors other novels.

Evelyn travels to a small Nevada town to finalize her divorce, and there encounters Ann. The two slowly ease into a love affair, and as Evelyn's court appearance and scheduled departure loom ahead, the two struggle to figure out just how a relationship between two women could possibly last. Rule's writing is a bit dated for modern audiences, but the potency of Ann and Evelyn's love burns through the later parts of the novel. I think the movie adaption "Desert Hearts" beautifully captures the essentials of the book, but like the other reviewers have mentioned, it's almost a different story in places.

Gosh, i don't know how to describe the book. It made me not wan't to finish it for some reason...definitley did not want it to end. Simple but complicated, pragmatic but idealistic, honest but contrived, cold but sentimental, seemingly weak but strong...it goes on and on. I do not agree with some reviewer who mentioned that it is not relevant today, but is relevant because of the history. This book would remain relevant for years to come, as some true classics become.

This book may offend some readers sentiments with the number of pages devoted to Ann's male lover and her conflict for example, but that is honest writing as i see. It shows what the real Ann is made of (kind of like layers in the earths crust- some soft, some hard, some water, some minerals and all go to enrich living life of all kinds. Helen also is shown in all her glory, her predicament, her thinking mind, her arguments, her approach to life, her compassion and her acceptance.

No lengthy boring conversations, no contrived situations, no false scenarios like the current crop of lesbian authors seem to be manufacturing in hundreds, but a beautiful story which makes you think.

I bought this book 4 years ago and it still one of the few books i consider the best of the ones i have read so far.... It makes you think for days, years, makes you ponder, and makes you wish you live the lives of the character(s) described in it.

Compared to the content of the book, this review many be one big ramble, but i had to:-)
AMAZING BOOK!!!!! JANE (STILL) RULES

In today's society, Jane Rule's "Desert of the Heart" may not seem as intriguing or groundbreaking as it did when it was published in 1964. The love story between two women, one seeking a divorce from her husband and both seeking to find who they truly are, is examined along with questions of morality and identity. Published at a time when the psychological association still identified homosexuality as a mental illness, Rule's depiction of two women unwilling to disguise who they are is amazing for its time and still resonant in today's world.

Evelyn Hall travels to Reno for a divorce from her husband. When questioned by her lawyer for a reason, she is at a loss, knowing only that they have never truly been husband and wife because she could never be who she was expected to be. Evelyn stays at a boarding house where she meets Ann Childs, a young woman who looks remarkably like herself and who works in the local casino even though she is smarter and more talented than her work. The two have an immediate smoldering attraction and interest in each other. Ann, much more outspoken, attempts to court Evelyn who is unsure of what accepting these advances will make her confess about herself. Together they embark on a relationship that is filled with learning and pitfalls, trying to decide if there is a place in the world where they could ever be together.

Rule's novel is unsentimental and compassionate at the same time. She does not shy away from sensitive issues and offers some extremely heartfelt observations about life, love, sin, and morality. The desert world of Reno, Nevada serves as a microcosm for the world and its precepts as Rule examines how conventions are not one size fits all. "Desert of the Heart" is an insightful journey through the minds of two very different women as they search for their true identities. It is a story that asks questions that are still in need of asking today.

"Desert of the Heart", with its tense lyricism and psychological profundity, is far removed from the smooth ride of "Desert Hearts", the sensational film upon which it was loosely (I do mean, loosely) based. It's fitting that both the title of the movie and the names of the two protaganists were changed--the celluloid version is that different. Jane Rule's vision stands on its own, well apart from the film.
As suffocating as a Sartre novel, "Desert of the Heart" is, at times, an uncomfortable read, but well worth the unpleasantness. Rule treats not only the desert but also the casino (where Ann Child works) with a dark poetic sensitivity that inspires a mixture of dread and awe. Ann and Evelyn's first meeting is almost as stultifying as it is revelatory; the former being described as being held in "a cage of light" as she stands by the window. That there's an intangible physical resemblance between the two fuels the already developing psychodrama; the same can be said for the decade and a half that separates their ages.
Men play a large role in "Desert of the Heart": Ann's relationship with Bill has been serious and Evelyn spends alot of time mulling over what went wrong with her marriage. Unlike with "Desert Hearts", the novel makes it clear that not only is Ann good friends with Silver, but they sleep together, too. Ann's not averse to the occasional one-night-stand with an out-of-town drunk, either. A fierce individualist, she's uneasy (and perhaps rightly so) about her growing emotional dependence on Evelyn. Evelyn, for her part, has moral reservations about the relationship, not to mention other more legitimate fears.--This WAS 1959.
For the last twenty or so pages, I felt suspended in a sort of freefall, frantically wondering how it would all end. Not to worry. The finale of "Desert of the Heart" is every bit as satisfying as that of "Desert Hearts", if not more.