Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2000: For 19th-century novelists--from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Flaubert to Henry James--social constraint gave a delicious tension to their plots. Yet now our relaxed morals and social mobility have rendered many of the classics untenable. Why shouldn't Maisie know what she knows? It will all come out in family therapy anyway. The vogue for historical novels depends in part on our pleasure in reentering a world of subtle cues and repressed emotion, a time in which a young woman could destroy her life by saying yes to the wrong man. After all, there was no reliable birth control, no divorce, no chance of an independent life or a scandal-free separation.
Christina Schwarz's suspenseful debut pivots on two of the lost "virtues" of the past: silence and stoicism. Drowning Ruth opens in 1919, on the heels of the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War. Although there were telephones and motor cars and dance halls in the small towns of Wisconsin in those years, the townspeople remained rigid and forbidding. As a young woman, Amanda Starkey, a Lutheran farmer's daughter, had been firmly discouraged from an inappropriate marriage with a neighboring Catholic boy. A few years later, as a nurse in Milwaukee, she is seduced by a dishonorable man. Her shame sends her into a nervous breakdown, and she returns to the family farm. Within a year, though, her beloved sister Mathilde drowns under mysterious circumstances. And when Mathilde's husband, Carl, returns from the war, he finds his small daughter, Ruth, in Amanda's tenacious grip, and she will tell him nothing about the night his wife drowned. Amanda's parents, too, are long gone. "I killed my parents. Had I mentioned that?" muses Amanda. I killed them because I felt a little fatigued and suffered from a slight, persistent cough. Thinking I was overworked and hadn't been getting enough sleep, I went home for a short visit, just a few days to relax in the country while the sweet corn and the raspberries were ripe. From the city I brought fancy ribbon, two boxes of Ambrosia chocolate, and a deadly gift... I gave the influenza to my mother, who gave it to my father, or maybe it was the other way around. Schwarz is a skillful writer, weaving her grim tale across several decades, always returning to the fateful night of Mathilde's death. Drowning Ruth displays her gift for pacing and her harsh insistence on the right ending, rather than the cheery one. --Regina Marler
From the beginning of Drowning Ruth, I kept wondering, is Ruth's aunt Amanda just kind of crazy, or really crazy? The story begins with Ruth's memory of drowning when she was four, at the time her mother drowned beneath the ice. Aunt Amanda keeps telling Ruth that of course she didn't drown, but Ruth has emotional memories of the time surrounding her mother's death. Drowning Ruth is as much (or more) Amanda's story as Ruth's, a story about the healthy and unhealthy bonds of family.
Drowning Ruth is set in rural Wisconsin starting in 1919. The isolated farms and communities seem to foster private sorrows. Although the farm family's private island is idealized, generally life for these characters is harsh. There's no eccentric charm of Lake Wobegon here. Although I didn't click with any of the characters, the complexity of the puzzle drew me in.
The back of the book blurb describes it as a "psychological thriller". That's a misnomer better applied to The Alienist: A Novel. It's more of a family drama where Amanda's past unfolds piece by disjointed piece as Ruth's life progresses along a chronological path. This book is sold as an Oprah book and a book club book to an audience of women, because the primary material is motherly/sisterly/daughterly love, but it's also a good historical study. This is Christina Schwartz's first novel, and an impressive first one it is.
writes,
Read this for a book club. Wish I hadn't. Going back to romances now so I don't have to deal with any more suffering than absolutely required.
writes,
I haven't found an emotional thriller to beat "Drowning Ruth". The fact that I could get so involved with the characters that I wanted to shout at them is a credit to Schwarz's style. The plot twists -so surprising-yet not, in retrospect, reminded me of the last chapters of "Rebecca".
