\n<\/p>\n
The community, or, as its members call it, the Dorf, has everything a person might need. It has a medical center and a kitchen, a \u201cBabyhouse\u201d for child care, and a \u201cLaundryhouse\u201d for the obvious. The Steward acquires food provisions for the Dorf\u2019s hundreds of residents, and every Saturday afternoon, the wives walk over to Stores to pick up their family\u2019s weekly grocery allotment. (There\u2019s even a sauna for shvitzing, though the members wouldn\u2019t use that word.) As a child, the titular character of Kate Riley\u2019s debut novel, Ruth, can\u2019t conceive of a life outside this \u201ccomplete ecosystem.\u201d But as an adult, she wonders whether anyone can endure a life without the one thing the community doesn\u2019t provide: any room for the self.<\/p>\n
The Brotherhood, the Anabaptist Christian sect that occupies the Dorf, can easily be explained in terms of what it forbids. To start, there are no bicycles or ball games, no mirrors larger than the palm of one\u2019s hand, and almost no personal property. At one point, when the Dorf merges with another colony, candles, musical instruments, and dolls are added to the list of verboten items; Ruth\u2019s mother replaces her doll with a knot of terry cloth in the middle of the night. The group\u2019s primary rule, The First Law of Ro\u00dfdorf, states, \u201cThere must never be talk, either in open remarks or in insinuation, against a brother or a sister, against their individual characteristics\u2014under no circumstances behind the person\u2019s back. Talking in one\u2019s own family is no exception.\u201d Even critical opinions are forbidden among Ruth\u2019s people.<\/p>\n
What an institution like the Dorf celebrates can be harder to define for those who grew up in a highly individualistic culture. Yet Ruth, a generous coming-of-age story, portrays this cloistered place sympathetically, if often with a wink. The Dorf, we learn, has a zeal for sing-alongs (though not a talent for them). Its inhabitants share a heartwarming penchant for making floral arches on special occasions. Inventive elementary-school teachers bury a cow\u2019s skeleton so the children can excavate it like archaeologists. And much to the reader\u2019s pleasure, the Dorf has Ruth\u2014a very creative woman raised inside a group that enforces uniformity. She\u2019s a wit, a half-hearted troublemaker, the kind of woman who takes a pound of meat at a hotel buffet just because she can. And though her life lacks the things that many women in contemporary fiction want\u2014agency, freedom, maternal bonds, a romantic match\u2014it is also delightfully normal, relatable in its small joys and frustrations.<\/p>\n
Ruth is arranged in a series of almost-irreverent vignettes, which date from Ruth\u2019s early childhood in the 1960s through her middle age. The through line is the author\u2019s refusal to look at the Brotherhood from the outside in; Riley isn\u2019t some voyeur watching a house on a summer night just after the lights come on. Instead, she puts the reader right alongside Ruth. The third-person narrative voice is Ruth\u2019s great achievement\u2014its constant vacillation between droll superiority and unabashed earnestness makes it hard for the reader to determine whether they know better than the characters or if, in fact, they have quite a lot to learn from them.<\/p>\n
The novel is full of Ruth\u2019s deadpan delivery and intellectual verve. She is precocious, and a ham; she holds \u201ca monopoly on brainy female despair.\u201d She is also never offered a choice in any meaningful decisions about her life. Although she earns copious college credits while in high school, the colony\u2019s elders send her off on a cooking course after graduation. When that proves less than fruitful\u2014Ruth excels only in \u201cthe dark art of aspic,\u201d turning sundry meats into jellies\u2014they move her into stenography and archival work, like some sort of late-19th-century typewriter girl. She silently harbors a crush on Calvin Winslow, a fellow lover of Dostoyevsky, but is paired for marriage with Alan Feder, a man whose first reported words of intimacy with his new wife are \u201cI\u2019m a very cautious driver.\u201d In fact, Ruth learns of their engagement only when Alan approaches her and speaks to her unbidden, something that does not happen between unmarried men and women on the Dorf. Most galling to me is the scene in which Ruth, freshly delivered of her third child and ripe for another bout of postpartum depression, expresses the fervent hope that they might name the new baby girl \u201cIdea\u201d\u2014\u201cit meant her favorite thing.\u201d But she awakens from a short nap to learn, without explanation, that her husband has called the baby Gretel. She does not protest.<\/p>\n
Riley might have cast such a group as brutally anti-feminist, the novelistic equivalent of the polygamist compound in the HBO series Big Love, where girls are heavily groomed by the community\u2019s elders and poverty prevents them from leaving. In another book, Miriam Toews\u2019s novel Women Talking, which is based on a true story, a group of Mennonite women debates whether to flee their isolated community\u2014or stay and fight\u2014after a group of men are caught drugging and raping them. The young women in Emma Cline\u2019s The Girls, about a Manson-like cult in 1960s California, are trapped by their sadness and shoddy sense of self, which the group\u2019s charismatic leader can sniff out and utilize to his own violent ends. Happiness isn\u2019t even on the horizon for the women in these stories. The question, instead, is whether they will escape their captors.<\/p>\n
But Ruth is not a novel about whether a dissatisfied woman ought to stay or leave. That dichotomy would sound overly simplistic to Ruth\u2019s ears. When a friend from cooking school visits the Dorf and, after some polite chatter, hard-whispers to Ruth, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to get out of here,\u201d the lingering feeling is awkwardness, not desperation\u2014Ruth worries she\u2019ll be pitied. Because Ruth does know the outside world and never considers living in it. She attends an American public high school and experiences its highs and lows. (Imagine the emotional peril of attending homeroom in a modest, pleated floor-length homemade skirt with matching vest and bloomers in 1977.) She accompanies Alan to conferences at Midwest hotels and is an ardent news consumer. The Dorf is open enough to American culture that at one point her young daughter colors in a printout of Tupac Shakur.<\/p>\n
Instead of a tale of entrapment or escape, Ruth is a story about how a woman full of longing can operate inside a collective that shuns the very notion of wanting. Riley\u2019s great trick is to tap into the anodyne, to make Ruth a woman whose concerns\u2014about her husband\u2019s grating tics, the disintegration of her favorite dress, the inscrutable demands of the patriarchy operating above her\u2014are essentially universal, even if their specifics might strike some readers as alien.<\/p>\n
To get by, Ruth operates in two modes: \u201cCheerful, she made mischief, and mournful, she destroyed.\u201d The mischief is minor but searching. In middle age, she begins to ask the servers at communal dinners for inventive, if far-fetched, methods of food delivery: \u201cher soup in an envelope, her ice cream on an Egyptian litter.\u201d Later she discovers her \u201ccalling\u201d\u2014that is, a trifling talent that the community\u2019s leader will let her pursue\u2014drawing flippant cartoons and messages on the dining-room whiteboard (\u201cJesus sez \u2018Do not worry\u2019\u2014Matthew 6:25\u201d).<\/p>\n
The destruction is often bleakly funny, as when Ruth is so dispirited by her dullard of a husband that she sits in the passenger seat of the car, makes eye contact with passing strangers, and tries to look \u201clike a woman abducted.\u201d Occasionally the desolation is real, and it might feel familiar for many women: long afternoons spent in bed, sometimes weeks at a time\u2014at one point leading to the removal of her children from her care. She is given to secret bouts of crying.<\/p>\n
Then again, other moments are shot through with radiant pleasure. There are her three children, whom she loves \u201cas she was meant to love her neighbors, as herself.\u201d On spring days, when \u201cthe larks leap in the sky,\u201d she wakes \u201cwith a deepening courtesy for life, hers particularly.\u201d And she has Island of the Blue Dolphins, a children\u2019s book about a girl trapped alone on an island, which she reads repeatedly instead of cleaning, imagining herself living in the girl\u2019s whalebone hut with her dog for a companion. This is a telling fantasy\u2014to feel more content in one\u2019s dreamed aloneness than in real society.<\/p>\n
Is Ruth happy? Can she be\u2014without personal property, without the ability to express fondness for her own children over others, without a suitable outlet for her cutting intellect and great expectations? Could anyone find happiness when their spouse and job are selected for them, their preferences assiduously repressed, even their dress patterns and fabrics decided by committee? Well, perhaps.<\/p>\n
Happiness, it turns out, feels much the same on the Dorf as it does in any big city or small town. It\u2019s fleet as a fox and changeable as a mood. Sometimes it appears in the form of a coveted bottle of floral-scented hair conditioner or a favorite dessert. Sometimes it feels like the sound of an ill-tempered child or a snoring husband. Sometimes it is tantalizingly out of reach\u2014just as it can be for any woman.<\/p>\n
\u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The community, or, as its members call it, the Dorf, has everything a person might need. It has a medical center and a kitchen, a \u201cBabyhouse\u201d for child care, and a \u201cLaundryhouse\u201d for the obvious. The Steward acquires food provisions for the Dorf\u2019s hundreds of residents, and every Saturday afternoon, the wives walk over to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[3882,2004,668],"class_list":{"0":"post-16786","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-autonomy","9":"tag-happy","10":"tag-woman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}