Inspired by the author\u2019s own experience, Kate Riley\u2019s debut novel depicts one woman\u2019s life in the US chapter of an international Anabaptist sect. \u201cThe Brotherhood\u201d is\u00a0an insular and reactionary society founded by German emigrants. All\u00a0property is held in common and centrally rationed in \u201ca constantly recalibrating state of voluntary poverty\u201d; collectivity is so rigidly enforced that even the family unit is considered a potential threat, with youngsters periodically rehoused in different families. Women (\u201csisters\u201d) are assigned dowdy dresses in order to repress desire, and merely humming a tune is a guilty pleasure. This bleak way of life is rendered in a series of episodic dispatches, and the title character\u2019s inner life is imparted in a free indirect third person as she grapples with doubt, shame and boredom.<\/p>\n
Ruth is knock-kneed and clumsy, prone to malingering and fixated on language. She feels guilty if she rehashes a joke \u2013 because self-plagiarism might constitute \u201cempty speech\u201d, which is a sin. Having been raised in such an austere environment, her mind is blown on her first day at a public high school: \u201cEnumerating the varieties of blue jeans made her think very seriously of infinity \u2026 The running list of exotic clothing she\u2019d witnessed \u2026 ennobled her impulse to stare..\u201d Time and again her thoughts circle back to the riddle of visual pleasure. \u201cBeauty was an argument, but for what?\u201d For Stendhal it meant the promise of happiness, and it connotes something similar here: life force, connection. Ruth is terribly lonely, plagued by a \u201cconstant lugubrious awareness of her own isolation\u201d; \u201call she wanted was a friend who knew she was suffering but would not make her talk about it\u201d. Instead, she marries a man she finds boring, has three children with him and sinks into depression. Decades pass in the blink of an eye. On a road trip for their 21st anniversary, we find her staring out from the passenger seat like a sullen teenager: \u201cEvery passing car was an opportunity to project pathos; she made eye contact and tried to look like a woman abducted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reticence, dissociation, quiet quitting: these are the unsung heroes of self-care, as Riley\u2019s protagonist can vouch<\/p>\n
This is as much as we get by way of overarching narrative: not so much an arc as a flat line. In the most enjoyable plotless novels, the rhythms of inner life generate a momentum that substitutes for action. Here, Ruth\u2019s diffident consciousness is a halting, intermittent presence; on the page as in life, she is overshadowed by her environment. Yet although the novel sometimes drags, Riley\u2019s droll, sardonic narrative voice keeps the reader on board. She does a nice line in adverbial intensifiers: Ruth\u2019s father is \u201cdeeply, magnetically pathetic\u201d; a dog is \u201chypnotically dim\u201d; a doctor is a \u201ctiny and turbulently pink little man\u201d. There are some memorable, elegantly economical descriptions: we encounter \u201ca glossy, ursine sister\u201d, \u201ca cedar barn of a man\u201d, a \u201csquash-like cardinal\u201d, and an \u201cextremely vertical\u201d visitor who \u201cfell into handsome lines when quiet\u201d. A group of women in an old black-and-white photograph look \u201clike rats in kerchiefs\u201d; an enthusiastic bather \u201choisted up her skirt and slip and rushed into the water like a stung hen\u201d.<\/p>\n
Riley\u2019s narrator is part wry anthropologist, part reluctant memoirist. Hers is very different from the kind of candour we have become accustomed to in contemporary fiction: it\u2019s essentially withholding, and the emotional payoff is to be found\u00a0not in the explicit excavation of\u00a0trauma, but in bittersweet moments of\u00a0levity and flights of whimsy. At one point, Ruth considers naming her daughter Idea: \u201cIt meant her favourite thing; it required only the slightest blunting of the mind to sound like it had been a little girl\u2019s name all along. And it had occurred unbidden \u2026 like relief from hiccups and most angels.\u201d (She doesn\u2019t go through with it.) Literary culture has become so mired in therapeutic discourse that we\u2019ve almost forgotten there are other, subtler ways to explore pain. Reticence, dissociation, quiet quitting: these are the unsung heroes of self-care, as Riley\u2019s protagonist can vouch. \u201cRuth detached with ease; her life was one long, loud Velcro release from the world.\u201d<\/p>\n