In Search of Meaningful Answers
In Search of Meaningful AnswersA Review of
Ruth: A Novel
Kate Riley
Hardcover: Riverhead Books, 2025
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Reviewed by Maryanne Hannan
The eponymous hero of Kate Riley’s debut novel Ruth almost comes into the world as Maybelline Raisinette, the name favored by her mother. Throughout the book, she will vacillate between two personas. In fact and deed she is a loyal, committed participant in the Hutterite community in which she is born, yet by virtue of her wild, impetuous commentary, she takes on a fundamental role as outsider within the community.
Ruth is born in 1963 in an Anabaptist Christian community living in a Dorf in rural Michigan. The community holds property in common; they make decisions through Quaker-like meetings and prayer; their lives are organized around the principle that individuality is anathema to holiness. The ideal finds expression in the Shalom girls painting Christmas and Easter cards, “working as one body and without ego.”
Every personal success counts against ultimate success. Self-scrutiny is encouraged—though too much of it is discouraged. When someone confesses their sins and seeks punishment (exclusion), she is denied: “Rhiannon accepted the Brotherhood’s inclusion and apologized for the arrogance of overestimating her sins.” The book does not criticize the sect itself but accepts it as another way humans organize themselves to meet long-term goals—whether salvation or temporal security and support, or basic human happiness. Riley, who lived for a year in a similar community, writes respectfully of this way of life.
The book follows Ruth’s life, marriage and children, her moves within the community from Michigan to the Great Plains to Canada, and the world’s changes over more than fifty years. As the twentieth century unfolds, the Dorf and elements of their way of life change without comment or criticism. Readers looking for a novel that examines whether life in an intentional community fosters faith or facilitates personal happiness will not find it here.
What they will find is wry, perceptive, often hilarious commentary positioned within the search for meaningful, moral answers. For example, on a visit to the Holiday Inn, Ruth notices, “Makeup allowed one to lie without speaking.” On abortion and murder, she observes “by all accounts, death was enviable but God discourages it.” For a perfect statement of radical ambivalence and self-awareness, there is this: “This was the world she wanted, and wanted to escape: a maze with strangers, and somewhere within it a single room containing the man who bored her.” These one-and two-liners are the novel’s greatest success.
As Ruth moves steadily towards marriage, the first half of the novel reads as a comedy of manners. The second half is more problematic: what happens beyond the wedding? What if Darcy and family had to see Elizabeth through post-partum depression and ongoing life challenges? For that is Ruth’s lot. Within a week of their marriage, Alan pronounces total acceptance of the woman he’s married, “You’re a weird one, Mom.” Whether despite that, or because of it, we never know—but he remains her faithful, loving husband.
From an early age, Ruth castigates herself for an excess of curiosity. By book’s end, she still “knew herself to be a sinner,” yet she accepts her curiosity, aligned as it is with her wit, and really, her identity. In the final passages, she and Alan are meeting their son, Jamie, whom they have not seen in eighteen months. He has followed his own personal disposition, removing himself from the community where he was raised.
Tension is high; resolution is at hand. Does Ruth wish she had done the same in her youth? Has she accepted her “curiosity,” which has become synonymous with her own rebellious interrogations? Is she happy—a question that, though not the community’s goal, lingers over the novel? Does the novel offer any closure to these questions?
Enroute to seeing Jamie, Ruth and Alan meet a fellow passenger. “What do you think is the most popular syllable in the world?’ she asks him. From the great storehouse of her penetrating insights, this question is among the lamest but “she found her question charming and repeated it.” At peace with her curiosity, still acutely sensitive to the pain of existence, is she nevertheless happy? In the novel’s final conversation, her son tells her she looks happy, and after some hesitation, she admits, “I am.” He agrees, thereby answering that question.
Speaking of endings, much has been made of the fact that Kate Riley insisted the book jacket state, “this is her last book.” It is such a singular book that her instinct is understandable. But let’s hope it is not the last we have heard from Riley. There is always stand-up to consider.
Maryanne Hannan
Maryanne Hannan is a poet and frequent book reviewer, and also a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in upstate New York and is the author of Rocking like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). More information at www.mhannan.com.
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