Dwight Garner at the NY Times:
There are inklings of greatness in Kate Riley’s first novel, “Ruth.” It claims a place on that high modern shelf next to the offbeat books of Ottessa Moshfegh, Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman and Nell Zink — those possessors of wrinkled comic sensibilities rooted in pain.
It isn’t easy of access and won’t be to everyone’s taste. Riley makes an “elite product,” as the English writer Angela Carter said of her own fiction. If “Ruth” fails to find its readership now, I suspect it will become an underground classic of American folk wit, one that happens to be about growing up in a religious cult. “Ruth” is defiantly strange, and so is Ruth, the protagonist, whom we follow from youth (she is born in 1963) into late middle age. She grows up in a series of linked Christian communes, which resemble Amish settlements. Lives are led mostly off the grid: Property is shared, underwear is homemade and sports and dancing are discouraged for fear of body worship. Distant is the secular world of “printed T-shirts and cohabitation before marriage.” Romantic love is suspect because it can pry members from strictly communal bonds. There is a loose, ambient sense of near-totalitarian surveillance.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.