{"id":31264,"date":"2025-08-29T18:13:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T18:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/31264\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T18:13:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T18:13:09","slug":"pictures-of-life-on-a-christian-commune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/31264\/","title":{"rendered":"Pictures of Life on a Christian Commune"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kate Riley\u2019s ambitious d\u00e9but novel, \u201cRuth<\/a>,\u201d opens in 1963, the year that its protagonist, Ruth Scholl, is born into a scrupulously managed Christian commune in Michigan. She grows up with two brothers, a working father, and a homemaker mother, who harbors some irreverent longings for the outside world. (We\u2019re told that she wishes she\u2019d named her daughter \u201cMaybelline Raisinette\u201d instead.) As a child, Ruth is eccentric and absent-minded, and her mother often accuses her of \u201cbuddling,\u201d meaning \u201cto waste time on little jobs; to fuss, to fiddle, to sit in a corner skinning twigs with the edge of a spoon instead of tidying up.\u201d When Ruth is older, her mother\u2019s warning turns prophetic: she spends much of her adult life doing odd tasks, only now at the behest of her church, which puts her to work digging fencepost holes and paring down the community songbook (too many songs about cuckoo birds).<\/p>\n

Ruth\u2019s family belongs to a denomination called the Brotherhood, an Anabaptist organization that consists of several small villages known as Dorfs. Local standards of comportment and life style are chosen by each Dorf\u2019s board of elders, but these can be superseded by higher authorities that control larger regions of the church. The rules produced by this system can be cryptic, and they change frequently because of cost-saving measures and shifting political alliances among the Dorfs, but they\u2019re also treated as absolute. Ruth\u2019s clothing, education, occupations, and places of residence are determined by the elders, and any of these conditions can change at the drop of a hat.<\/p>\n

For the most part, Ruth carries out her daily chores, and submits to the Brotherhood\u2019s inflexible vision of domesticity. Heterosexual family life is central to the Dorf\u2019s hierarchy, complete with traditional patriarchy. (\u201cAs Christ was the leading head of the Church\u2019s body, so did the husband coordinate the parts of his family,\u201d the narrator informs us.) At the same time, the Brotherhood discourages any worldly attachment that privileges one person over another person, or over God. The apparent contradiction between functioning hierarchy and theoretical equality is often invoked in the novel\u2019s pages, without generating much tension. Mostly it just gives rise to more rules, like the establishment of the Shalom, a group of unwed young people, some of them children, who are sent to live with different families around the Dorf to encourage a state of \u201cfamiliarity without favoritism.\u201d Somehow, this doesn\u2019t seem to cause any major problems.<\/p>\n

Riley, who grew up in Manhattan, spent a year in her twenties living in a community like the one depicted in \u201cRuth.\u201d The book started as a series of impressionistic e-mails that she sent to the critic Molly Young, who published an acclaimed early version of the novel, under the title \u201cMiriam,\u201d through her indie press. It\u2019s curious, then\u2014given \u201cRuth\u201d \u2019s fascinating setting and provenance\u2014how little the book has to say about community or faith. Narrated in close third with regular glimpses of Ruth\u2019s interiority, the novel is structured as a series of short, loosely chronological vignettes, on subjects including Dorf facilities (there\u2019s the Babyhouse, the Meeting Hall, the Help Yourself room, the Sewing Room, and so on), daily tasks and group projects, and the humble escapades of fleeting ancillary characters, who effectively get up onstage with their backs to the audience, murmur their lines, and skip away. When we meet one such character, Marion, an assigned house guest to the Feder household, Riley notes her unimportance: \u201cRuth could not summon care here, but merely placed their guest in mental fluorescents and thought elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what is most surprising of all is that this novel seems in large part to be about desserts\u2014and I don\u2019t mean the kind the Almighty doles out as just retribution to sinners. (Those are \u201cdeserts.\u201d) Cakes, pastries, and dustings of chocolate powder litter the pages of this book. Some of the dessert content arises during an extended episode where the Brotherhood orders Ruth to attend a nearby community college\u2019s culinary-arts program\u2014but not so very much of it. Although life in the Dorfs is simple, the desserts at communal meals can get complicated, and are always evolving in accordance with tastes, morals, and budgetary concerns. Early on we learn that \u201cqualifying desserts,\u201d in the Dorf where Ruth was raised, \u201cin order of rarity and appeal, were ice cream, chocolate pie, fruit pie, iced sheet cake, puddings and Bavarian creams, nude sheet cake, stewed fruit with dumplings, gelatin molds, muesli.\u201d It\u2019s a great day when Ruth\u2019s father, a steward who works for the Dorf\u2019s Stores department, lands a deal with Frozee\u2019s ice cream. Elsewhere, we get the image of \u201ca candy bar tied to a helium balloon.\u201d There are \u201cpies of breathtaking uniformity.\u201d There is something called a \u201chot cross bun marathon.\u201d Yogurt is not really a dessert, but there is a not-insignificant passage about that, too.<\/p>\n

In the course of the novel, Ruth gets married, has kids, works various jobs, and moves to different Dorfs, but her relationships don\u2019t develop or transform. There is no plot holding the novel together. Instead, \u201cRuth\u201d is fully stocked with a pantheon of twee iconography which is by no means limited to fancy desserts. We also see a \u201cchild-size laundry cart,\u201d a group repentance session instigated when the elders discover that Ruth has been taking more than her share of butter packets from the local high school, discussion of teapot spouts, a \u201ccircle dance trend,\u201d \u201ckerchief semiotics,\u201d \u201cbanana triage,\u201d \u201cBiblical schmiblical,\u201d \u201crecreational pony-cart rides,\u201d a drawing of \u201ca purse shaped like a pastry bag,\u201d and the rationing of commercial dye because of a sudden Dorf-wide passion for Pisanki eggs. There is, regrettably, even the apotheosis of twee: \u201cjam miscegenation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether by destiny or by design, \u201cRuth\u201d tests the hypothesis that style can be everything, that style can be God. The language is mannered throughout, a touch Jane Austen and a touch Laurence Sterne. \u201cUntil ninth grade,\u201d the narrator states, \u201cRuth had had no cause to distinguish the concepts of clothing and uniform.\u201d Riley\u2019s style is excellent at delivering deadpan comedy and perfect bouquets of imagery. Her sensibility shares much with the finely calibrated, showily droll films of Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos. Here is Ruth reciting the topics and activities most popular among her male cohort: \u201cSoil erosion, small engine maintenance, and amperage are known brotherly things. Whittling. There\u2019s been a mania for audio equipment since we started using a microphone at Meetings.\u201d<\/p>\n

This finicky, formal style coats every page of the novel with an impressively even surface that doesn\u2019t serve any deeper spiritual purpose. \u201cRuth\u201d \u2019s polish can be one of its pleasures, but Riley is often willing to sacrifice clarity and mood for the sake of a shiny word or a grandiose turn of phrase. In her community-college class on Modern Concepts in Pastry, Ruth meets and briefly befriends a fellow-student, Kim Modelski, who we learn \u201cwas a creature of extreme visual interest, decorated with swags of fabric and a tackle box worth of jewelry, but just a single modest pearl nestled in each earlobe.\u201d Where, then, is all the other jewelry? A tackle box suggests fishing hooks, piercings that extend beyond the earlobes, but surely Ruth wouldn\u2019t fail to mention such fascinating, forbidden ornaments in greater detail. What we\u2019re left with is an effete description that exists for itself and doesn\u2019t illuminate the character. There are many such instances. A few lines later, we learn that pearl is Kim\u2019s birthstone, \u201cand that Ruth\u2019s birthstone was\u2014here Kim paused to perform an emotion that had yet to debut in the community\u2014diamonds.\u201d But we never get any hint as to what this emotion may be. It\u2019s trapped in that proverbial tackle box.<\/p>\n

It is Ruth alone who anchors the book in any consistent feeling. She is, we are told from the start, a bit strange. She is mischievous, disarming, earnest, a seeker\u2014and incredibly obedient. That\u2019s a rich dichotomy, and whenever the narrative voice drills into the specificity of Ruth\u2019s anxious imagination, the reader is rewarded. When child Ruth thinks about her maternal grandparents, who died before she was born, she pictures them \u201csleeping under a rose petal in a walnut shell and leaping over candles.\u201d She thinks at this young stage that as she grows up she will gradually become opaque to God, and likens this process to \u201cegg whites, clouding in a frying pan,\u201d an achingly beautiful image.<\/p>\n

After a while, though, the lack of conflict in her world becomes glaring. An insular community of American Christians that is, at least for the five decades that this book covers, basically free from scandal, strife, and outbursts is not to be believed. But it\u2019s true\u2014the women don\u2019t make a fuss about being subservient, the parents don\u2019t fret about their kids being taken away. Nothing so much as a heated theological debate breaches the Brotherhood\u2019s temperate cultural climes. When people leave for good, as Ruth\u2019s son eventually does, they do so of their own volition, with seemingly few repercussions for their loved ones. In the novel\u2019s second half, Ruth turns melancholy after marrying a dull man who calls her \u201cMom\u201d before they\u2019ve even had kids. She weeps at the breakfast table, but the desserts continue to pile up there as well. She attends a pro-life conference in D.C., where she\u2019s mostly unmoved by the pamphlets, but feels perturbed by \u201cthe frequency and brevity of denim shorts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Brotherhood bears some resemblance to the Bruderhof, a tiny Christian pacifist sect founded in Germany in the nineteen-twenties that left its country of origin and spread around the globe in response to Nazi Fascism. Riley\u2019s novel mentions a few historic national conflicts taking place beyond the Dorf\u2014especially the civil-rights movement, which comes to a head during Ruth\u2019s early childhood\u2014but it deals awkwardly with the concept of political struggle, which is never more than an abstraction for Ruth. Through conversations with Merlin Klee, a Dorf elder and former Freedom Rider, she comes to believe that \u201cthere was more moral clarity in the parables of Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges than in much directly attributed to Christ.\u201d But her commitment is untested and short-lived. Riley writes that Ruth \u201chad never met a Black person, nor anyone exhibiting signs of poverty; whatever love she could render went only to those she already knew, far harder to love for already knowing them.\u201d This clumsy explanation perhaps reflects Ruth\u2019s own muddled thinking about love and resistance, which makes her susceptible to accepting the status quo. A thin streak of curiosity runs through Ruth, but she always returns to the flock without having strayed far. So, too, is the novel pulled irresistibly toward the sensuality of order and discipline: symmetrical sweets, quaint emotions, and petit-four politics.<\/p>\n

In the novel\u2019s final section, we learn of the Great Exclusion, a Dorf custom in which a brother or sister asks to be given the silent treatment by everyone else in the community. The subject of the exclusion makes this request \u201cin public and in despair.\u201d We are told that \u201cthere was something powerful\u201d about these shamefaced pleadings\u2014which come across as more theatrical than sinister\u2014but we never learn what that something is. It\u2019s another tackle-box moment. This may be Riley\u2019s attempt to portray the insularity and impenetrability of Ruth\u2019s community, a faith so particular that even the reader is denied access to it. The Brotherhood is the largest of the novel\u2019s precious, mysterious objects. It boasts old-fashioned construction and produces numerous wee moments of blissful drudgery, like ducklings marching in lockstep. But the reader\u2019s yearning for \u201csomething powerful\u201d is never extinguished. \u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kate Riley\u2019s ambitious d\u00e9but novel, \u201cRuth,\u201d opens in 1963, the year that its protagonist, Ruth Scholl, is born…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31265,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[1879,359,24676,24675,24674,7944,18,117,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-31264","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-book-reviews","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-christianity","11":"tag-christians","12":"tag-communes","13":"tag-community","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}