Pictures of Life on a Christian Commune

Kate Riley’s ambitious début novel, “Ruth,” opens in 1963, the year that its protagonist, Ruth Scholl, is born into a scrupulously managed Christian commune in Michigan. She grows up with two brothers, a working father, and a homemaker mother, who harbors some irreverent longings for the outside world. (We’re told that she wishes she’d named her daughter “Maybelline Raisinette” instead.) As a child, Ruth is eccentric and absent-minded, and her mother often accuses her of “buddling,” meaning “to waste time on little jobs; to fuss, to fiddle, to sit in a corner skinning twigs with the edge of a spoon instead of tidying up.” When Ruth is older, her mother’s warning turns prophetic: she spends much of her adult life doing odd tasks, only now at the behest of her church, which puts her to work digging fencepost holes and paring down the community songbook (too many songs about cuckoo birds).

Ruth’s family belongs to a denomination called the Brotherhood, an Anabaptist organization that consists of several small villages known as Dorfs. Local standards of comportment and life style are chosen by each Dorf’s board of elders, but these can be superseded by higher authorities that control larger regions of the church. The rules produced by this system can be cryptic, and they change frequently because of cost-saving measures and shifting political alliances among the Dorfs, but they’re also treated as absolute. Ruth’s clothing, education, occupations, and places of residence are determined by the elders, and any of these conditions can change at the drop of a hat.

For the most part, Ruth carries out her daily chores, and submits to the Brotherhood’s inflexible vision of domesticity. Heterosexual family life is central to the Dorf’s hierarchy, complete with traditional patriarchy. (“As Christ was the leading head of the Church’s body, so did the husband coordinate the parts of his family,” the narrator informs us.) At the same time, the Brotherhood discourages any worldly attachment that privileges one person over another person, or over God. The apparent contradiction between functioning hierarchy and theoretical equality is often invoked in the novel’s pages, without generating much tension. Mostly it just gives rise to more rules, like the establishment of the Shalom, a group of unwed young people, some of them children, who are sent to live with different families around the Dorf to encourage a state of “familiarity without favoritism.” Somehow, this doesn’t seem to cause any major problems.

Riley, who grew up in Manhattan, spent a year in her twenties living in a community like the one depicted in “Ruth.” The book started as a series of impressionistic e-mails that she sent to the critic Molly Young, who published an acclaimed early version of the novel, under the title “Miriam,” through her indie press. It’s curious, then—given “Ruth” ’s fascinating setting and provenance—how little the book has to say about community or faith. Narrated in close third with regular glimpses of Ruth’s interiority, the novel is structured as a series of short, loosely chronological vignettes, on subjects including Dorf facilities (there’s the Babyhouse, the Meeting Hall, the Help Yourself room, the Sewing Room, and so on), daily tasks and group projects, and the humble escapades of fleeting ancillary characters, who effectively get up onstage with their backs to the audience, murmur their lines, and skip away. When we meet one such character, Marion, an assigned house guest to the Feder household, Riley notes her unimportance: “Ruth could not summon care here, but merely placed their guest in mental fluorescents and thought elsewhere.”

But what is most surprising of all is that this novel seems in large part to be about desserts—and I don’t mean the kind the Almighty doles out as just retribution to sinners. (Those are “deserts.”) Cakes, pastries, and dustings of chocolate powder litter the pages of this book. Some of the dessert content arises during an extended episode where the Brotherhood orders Ruth to attend a nearby community college’s culinary-arts program—but not so very much of it. Although life in the Dorfs is simple, the desserts at communal meals can get complicated, and are always evolving in accordance with tastes, morals, and budgetary concerns. Early on we learn that “qualifying desserts,” in the Dorf where Ruth was raised, “in order of rarity and appeal, were ice cream, chocolate pie, fruit pie, iced sheet cake, puddings and Bavarian creams, nude sheet cake, stewed fruit with dumplings, gelatin molds, muesli.” It’s a great day when Ruth’s father, a steward who works for the Dorf’s Stores department, lands a deal with Frozee’s ice cream. Elsewhere, we get the image of “a candy bar tied to a helium balloon.” There are “pies of breathtaking uniformity.” There is something called a “hot cross bun marathon.” Yogurt is not really a dessert, but there is a not-insignificant passage about that, too.

In the course of the novel, Ruth gets married, has kids, works various jobs, and moves to different Dorfs, but her relationships don’t develop or transform. There is no plot holding the novel together. Instead, “Ruth” is fully stocked with a pantheon of twee iconography which is by no means limited to fancy desserts. We also see a “child-size laundry cart,” a group repentance session instigated when the elders discover that Ruth has been taking more than her share of butter packets from the local high school, discussion of teapot spouts, a “circle dance trend,” “kerchief semiotics,” “banana triage,” “Biblical schmiblical,” “recreational pony-cart rides,” a drawing of “a purse shaped like a pastry bag,” and the rationing of commercial dye because of a sudden Dorf-wide passion for Pisanki eggs. There is, regrettably, even the apotheosis of twee: “jam miscegenation.”

Whether by destiny or by design, “Ruth” tests the hypothesis that style can be everything, that style can be God. The language is mannered throughout, a touch Jane Austen and a touch Laurence Sterne. “Until ninth grade,” the narrator states, “Ruth had had no cause to distinguish the concepts of clothing and uniform.” Riley’s style is excellent at delivering deadpan comedy and perfect bouquets of imagery. Her sensibility shares much with the finely calibrated, showily droll films of Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos. Here is Ruth reciting the topics and activities most popular among her male cohort: “Soil erosion, small engine maintenance, and amperage are known brotherly things. Whittling. There’s been a mania for audio equipment since we started using a microphone at Meetings.”