This unusual debut explores the inner life of a woman in an insular American religious community
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nspired by the author’s own experience, Kate Riley’s debut novel depicts one woman’s life in the US chapter of an international Anabaptist sect. “The Brotherhood” is an insular and reactionary society founded by German emigrants. All property is held in common and centrally rationed in “a constantly recalibrating state of voluntary poverty”; collectivity is so rigidly enforced that even the family unit is considered a potential threat, with youngsters periodically rehoused in different families. Women (“sisters”) 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’s inner life is imparted in a free indirect third person as she grapples with doubt, shame and boredom.
Ruth is knock-kneed and clumsy, prone to malingering and fixated on language. She feels guilty if she rehashes a joke – because self-plagiarism might constitute “empty speech”, 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: “Enumerating the varieties of blue jeans made her think very seriously of infinity … The running list of exotic clothing she’d witnessed … ennobled her impulse to stare..” Time and again her thoughts circle back to the riddle of visual pleasure. “Beauty was an argument, but for what?” For Stendhal it meant the promise of happiness, and it connotes something similar here: life force, connection. Ruth is terribly lonely, plagued by a “constant lugubrious awareness of her own isolation”; “all she wanted was a friend who knew she was suffering but would not make her talk about it”. 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: “Every passing car was an opportunity to project pathos; she made eye contact and tried to look like a woman abducted.”
