Book Review : Novel of Hope and Despair Strikes a Dickensian Note

The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton (Ticknor & Fields: $18.95; 325 pages)

We think of Ruth, almost literally, as a maimed seedling; trampled, stunted, starved; bent out of shape but with an uncanny insistence on putting green shoots out of deformed ones.

Her father had left home. Her mother is twisted and consumed with bitterness after a lifetime of struggle. Ruth is brought up in the shadow of a favored and indifferent younger brother. The family, living in a small Illinois town, is poor. Ruth is ugly, awkward, a dullard at school and with no leaf turned toward the sunlight, seemingly, other than her odd affinity for Dickens and Jane Austen. She would like to have met Oliver Twist.

Jane Hamilton’s novel is authentically Dickensian, in fact. Ruth’s troubles are piled on in a fashion worthy of Oliver’s, or David Copperfield’s or Pip’s. They are excessive in every way.

There is no perspective, no breathing space between Ruth and her pain; between Ruth and those she lives among, each of whom is drawn in harsh and sometimes grotesque contrasts of dark and light.

Taking a Real Risk

It is a hard book to get through, in many ways. Hamilton is a first novelist and an unconventional one, and she takes a real risk. Ruth’s voice is truncated and unwell. Her anger and deprivation are unmusical; her perceptions are skewed. Depending upon them, we often feel we are on an unsound passage. And there are moments of exhilaration that make it all worthwhile.

“Ruth” begins at the end and circles back. A disaster has taken place; we do not know what it is, though well before the end, we get a sense of it. Meanwhile, we have Ruth’s shell-shocked narrative.

It is oblique and erratic; sometimes, we have to peer around it and sometimes we may not want to. Her story, she tells us, is about “the kernel of meanness in people’s hearts.” That is, and is not, it; on the other hand, it is the way that she, with her injured perception, would see it. Stars by daylight are what a bashed head sees; they give an accurate account of the head’s condition.

The stunting of Ruth’s life is not so much from meanness as from drought. Her memories of childhood, while her parents were still together, are of May (her angry mother) and a mild, bookish father.

May’s anger comes from drought as well; her first husband was killed in World War II. For 10 years afterwards, she was in a frozen state; then Elmer--ugly, ungainly, bald--proposed, and she accepted. “All the space around her seemed the same,” Hamilton writes in a desolate phrase.

There was a remembered moment or two of sunniness. Once, Elmer dropped a scoop of ice cream on Ruth’s head as he was serving it out. Suddenly, the family was united by laughter at the mishap. “Suddenly, I’m a celebrity,” Ruth recalls. It was “as if that July night we were actually experiencing the gladness some people feel every day.”

After Elmer walks out, there is little but deprivation. Ruth, awkward, unattractive and a poor student, is continually put down. There are a few bright notes--a blind woman for whom she plays tapes and who tells her stories about her life; an aunt who is a successful music teacher and writes to her. The aunt is another Dickensian touch; a distant benefactor whose benefaction only comes in at the end.

Ruth’s brother goes off to MIT on a scholarship and turns his back on the family. With no prospects, Ruth takes a job at the dry cleaners where May works. And then she falls in love.

It is the love of a slum child for a deformed kitten. Ruby has a sweet smile and rotting teeth. With Ruth, he is all passion and playfulness. But he cannot hold a job; when he is criticized, he weeps, or turns violent, or loses control of his bladder. He is mentally damaged, in fact; by a clumsy narrative device, Ruth learns of his medical and psychological history from his social case-worker.

Formula for Awfulness

She marries Ruby and they move in with May; it is a formula for awfulness and it ends in Gothic horror. Even before it does, though, the relationship is creepy and unsettling.

Hamilton, in fact, can go quite wrong in her cataloguing of Ruth’s miseries. The pain and humiliation are powerful, but they are inflicted in gobs, as if the author were hurling handfuls of black paint at her canvas.

Yet each time the reader may feel like drawing away, there is a moment of defiant wit. Working miserably at the dry cleaners and scolded for forgetting to give her customers the ritual benediction of our age, Ruth remembers a bit of biblical rhetoric that had struck her at church.

“The dung heaps shall smile,” the minister had trumpeted. “The dung heaps shall say ‘Have a nice day,’ ” Ruth mutters, her hands plunged into a pile of dirty clothes.

The real achievement of this first novel is not so much the blackness as the suggestion of resilience. At the end, Ruth begins to put together her shattered body, spirit and life. Her words are awkward, as they have been all along, but suddenly and unexpectedly they shine.