Drowning Ruth: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
by Christina Schwarz
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Book Summary Information
Author: Christina SchwarzEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-07-31
ISBN: 0345439104
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Drowning Ruth: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: A bit of a letdown
Summary: 2 Stars
This book focuses on Amanda Starkey, a young nurse who has suffered a breakdown and was sent home by her boss so she could get her act together. Amanda returns to her family home in Wisconsin to live with her sister, Mattie, and Mattie's daughter, Ruth. Mattie's husband, Carl, is off fighting in France during WWI.
The sisters are very close, and so Mattie is of course thrilled to have her sister back in her life on a daily basis again. They begin to embark on a new aspect of their life together, while Mattie anxiously waits for her husband's return from the war.
Then, one winter night, tragedy strikes, and Mattie ends up drowning in the nearby lake. Her young daughter, Ruth, almost ends up drowning as well, but is rescued in the nick of time.
Not long after Mattie's death, Carl returns from the war, wounded. He is eager to see his wife, not realizing that she has died.
Amanda, who has never liked Carl, hopes that he will decide to leave again almost as soon as he'd returned home. She figures him for the sort to not want to raise a child alone, and each day waits for him to leave, thereby making her Ruth's sole caretaker. Yet much to her annoyance, he manages to get his bearings again and remains a fixture in both hers and Ruth's life.
At the same time, Amanda struggles with inner demons, both because of what happened to her sister, and because of what happened in her life prior to returning home, which you eventually learn about. She is then sent to a sanatorium and Carl is left to care for his daughter on his own. However, he founders, and ends up relying on a second cousin (Hilda) for her grudging help.
This new upheaval causes Ruth to regress a great deal, and she stops talking and acts out by breaking things in the house and being impossible to toilet train and deal with overall. In a funny turn of events, Ruth manages to embarrass Hilda enough so that she leaves. Carl, in an act of desperation, takes Ruth with him on one of his many visits to see Amanda, in the hope that it will spark a desire in her to get well once and for all. It works, and a year after having been committed, Amanda returns home.
The rest of the story vacillates between what really happened the night Mattie drowned, and what is happening in Amanda and Ruth's life afterwards. In the first part of the book, Ruth ages from about 3-5. When the second part begins, she is already 11. I felt that was somewhat abrupt, and it took me a few pages to realize how much time had passed, as there wasn't anything to indicate that this had happened.
The book continued to bounce around a lot from this point on, between reminiscences of the past and what was actually happening to the characters months or years down the line. It got a little annoying at times to have to figure out where exactly the next installation was starting out. Also, the book jacket said the story was told from several of the main character's points of view, but the only ones you really hear from are Ruth and Amanda.
I was pretty disappointed by the end of the story. The book starts out intriguing and makes you wonder if Amanda literally went off the deep end after all and killed her sister, or if it was in fact an accidental drowning. But by about halfway through, the facts become clear and are easy to interpret. Still, I hoped maybe I was wrong and the ending would surprise me after all. It didn't.
Carl also disappears about halfway through the book. It's due to a job he takes, but it felt like he was written out of the story because the author ran out of use for him, or wasn't sure what to do with him after a certain point. She spent a lot of time focusing on Carl's desire to learn about the truth of his wife's death.
As it was, he only found out part of the truth, and that was according to what Amanda got him to believe. Nevertheless, Carl accepted it at face value and after that he accepted his wife's fate. He was then written out of the story. I didn't really like that aspect of things and didn't think it meshed with everything else that was happening. Even though he wasn't a strong character in general, he's one of the characters I actually liked. Amanda wasn't that likeable at all, and was a pretty cold person who was obsessed with Ruth and still obsessed with the past. Ruth was somewhat pliable and easily molded to her aunt's bidding, even though she made some feeble attempts to be her own person.
I don't know if I'd read this author again. But I managed to find this book for $1.. and would say it was worth it and I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it, either on here or in a bookstore.
Summary of Drowning Ruth: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
?POWERFUL . . . SUSPENSEFUL . . . RICHLY TEXTURED . . . [A] CHILLING, PRECOCIOUSLY GOOD START TO A BRIGHT NEW NOVELIST?S CAREER.??The New York Times
?[A] gripping psychological thriller . . . In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. . . . Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of the drowning. . . . Schwarz certainly succeeds at keeping the reader engrossed.?
?FRANCINE PROSE
Us Weekly
?DEFT AND ASSURED . . . [WITH] STRONG CHARACTERS AND A PLOT LONG ON TENSION AND SURPRISES.?
?Time
?A strong sense of portent and unusually vivid characters distinguish this mesmerizing first novel about horrifying family secrets and nearly annihilating guilt. Drowning Ruth is a complex and rewarding debut.?
?ANITA SHREVE
Author of The Pilot?s Wife
?RIVETING . . . A VERY SUSPENSEFUL TALE, ONE THAT WILL KEEP READERS UP SHIVERING IN THE NIGHT.?
?USA Today
Oprah Book ClubŪ 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
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