It would never work out, but I’m in love with Ruth ... Many delights ... Ruth doesn’t speak to us directly, but Riley’s narration is calibrated to reflect her protagonist’s evolving mind. That dynamic fidelity is all the more impressive for being almost imperceptible ... Delightful buoyancy ... The novel offers us life as seen through slits in a picket fence: We catch bright, sometimes hilarious moments, but the continuity of Ruth’s experience is splintered ... Many graces.
Much of the book’s quirky humor comes from Riley’s deadpan tone and her juxtaposition of odd details ... Grapples with free will and with valuing the collective over the individual ... What a strange and wonderful book this is — emphasis on the strange. No, wait — emphasis on the wonderful.
There are inklings of greatness ... It isn’t easy of access and won’t be to everyone’s taste ... Defiantly strange ... I respect this novel enough to say this in criticism: The reader waits for a second act, for a deepening or a new chord to appear, and it never quite does. Ruth begins to flatten about two-thirds of the way through. You end this novel swimming in the same water you entered ... Is in touch with the oldest and darkest things in our makeup, yet revels in a very modern sense of what Riley calls 'brainy female despair.'
Beautifully captured ... Ms. Riley’s novel is a wonderful, loving, tenderly teasing and often moving portrait ... Ms. Riley achieves a balance of warmth and subtle hilarity ... Her depiction of the Hutterites is affectionate and normalizing, though far from sentimental ... Standout.
Ambitious ... It’s curious, then—given Ruth ’s fascinating setting and provenance—how little the book has to say about community or faith ... What is most surprising of all is that this novel seems in large part to be about desserts ... There is no plot holding the novel together ... Whether by destiny or by design, Ruth tests the hypothesis that style can be everything, that style can be God ... Ruth ’s 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 ... It is Ruth alone who anchors the book in any consistent feeling ... After a while, though, the lack of conflict in her world becomes glaring ... The reader’s yearning for 'something powerful' is never extinguished.
Riley isn’t some voyeur watching a house on a summer night just after the lights come on. Instead, she puts the reader right alongside Ruth. The third-person narrative voice is Ruth’s great achievement—its constant vacillation between droll superiority and unabashed earnestness makes it hard for the reader to determine whether they know better than the characters or if, in fact, they have quite a lot to learn from them ... Riley’s great trick is to tap into the anodyne, to make Ruth a woman whose concerns—about her husband’s grating tics, the disintegration of her favorite dress, the inscrutable demands of the patriarchy operating above her—are essentially universal, even if their specifics might strike some readers as alien.
As much as we get by way of overarching narrative: not so much an arc as a flat line. In the most enjoyable plotless novels, the rhythms of inner life generate a momentum that substitutes for action. Here, Ruth’s diffident consciousness is a halting, intermittent presence ... Yet although the novel sometimes drags, Riley’s droll, sardonic narrative voice keeps the reader on board.
Riley’s first novel fascinates with its realistic depiction of Hutterite life and beliefs and the extraordinary narration of Ruth’s rich and idiosyncratic inner life from childhood to parenthood.
Riley's Ruth is a baffling character at times, especially as she accepts notions of submissive womanhood that defy feminist power. But throughout the novel, Ruth is a force, proving she can be no one but herself--an unlikely adherent, her rebellious heart committing to obedience.
Cheeky, inquisitive, and a delightful pain in the neck, Ruth carries the novel with aplomb. A charming deep dive into the life and faith of one devout yet contrary everywoman.
Riley keeps the narrative grounded with her wry depictions of everyday life in the Dorfs, where married couples 'earned privacy from others in exchange for nudity before each other.' Even as she renders the stifling conditions, she never loses sight of the characters’ humanity and spiritual searching, and she adeptly explores how faith and love can be sustained. It’s a remarkable achievement.
