Amish Paradise
On Kate Riley's 'Ruth'
My mother, though she possesses many fine traits, is not what anyone would call a trendsetter. Her tastes in movies and books and cooking are firmly, even fundamentally, middle of the road. She loves Apollo 13 and Return to Me; reads inspirational Christian fiction; cooks pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving using the recipe copied from the back of a Libby’s can at some vague point in the 1980s. The middle of the road is her lane and she stays in it.
Yet when it comes to her taste in reading, she is, weirdly, ahead of the curve. By decades, in fact. She has been reading Amish fiction, as in novels about the Amish written, almost exclusively, by Protestant Christian women, for as long as the genre has existed. When Beverly Lewis wrote The Shunning in the 1990s, my mother counted herself among the book’s enthusiastic readers. The Shunning portrayed life in a Pennsylvania Amish community, following the beats of many a romance novel with the requisite chasteness expected of such people. That book, and the genre it heralded, has only become more and more popular in the years since. Amish fiction, or ‘bonnet books,’ as they’re sometimes known, sell millions of copies a year, a shadow marketplace of bestsellers that, for years, were all but invisible to coastal tastemakers.
For those books were written by, and for, evangelical Christian women, nearly always white. Boxes that my mother certainly checks. These books provided these readers with the kind of emotional stories they wanted, imbued with Christian faith, and firmly lacking in lasciviousness. Bonnets, unlike bodices, never get ripped in these books. Yet the books are also—and this is really what accounts for their appeal—exotic. They portray the inner workings of an isolated community, one that exerts tremendous effort to stand apart from the modern world. The Amish compel just about everyone, but no one else than the evangelical Christians who live nearby, and worry that they don’t live up to the severe standard the plain folk demonstrate. “What if I lived like that?” wonders every reader who has paged through one of these books.
And it’s not just women like my mother reading, and writing, books like this anymore. Readers of all sorts—again, nearly always women—find themselves drawn to these books for reasons they cannot quite name, or cannot quite admit to themselves. For professional women on those distant coasts, Amish books offer the chance to explore fantasies similar to those offered by Hallmark Channel made-for-TV movies. Stories of frictionless small town life that promise escape from the hustle and bustle of the big city. These are fantasies, of course, as every viewer and reader knows. That is part of the appeal.
But what if one of those coastal elite women decided to make the fantasy real? And what if, in the aftermath, she wrote a book about it?
Ruth is the first and, per the author bio on the jacket flap, last novel by Kate Riley. Riley is a New Yorker born and raised, as this profile in The Cut details. Her mother was a literary agent, her father a lawyer. In her youth, she moved throughout her native city with remarkable freedom. Restlessness, too. After dropping out of Yale, she began volunteering at shelters, and became involved with the Catholic Worker. Eventually this led her to live, for a year, at a Christian commune. Riley declines to identify exactly which one, out of respect, but it seems possible that it was a Bruderhof community, maybe even the one in upstate New York, which publishes Plough, which I’ve written for! Small world.
Riley lived in the community for a year, scrubbing floors and baking pies. Years later, she wrote Ruth, a novel that takes place in a fictionalized version of the community, called the Brotherhood, which has locations, known as ‘Dorfs,’ all over the world. Ruth is not autofiction, however. The titular Ruth is a woman born and raised in the community, a Dorf in central Michigan. (I live nearby, in West Michigan! I recognize many of the place names here! This book really was written for me.) The story spans decades, from the 1960s to the present, yet reads quickly, 250 pages, composed of brief glimpses of Ruth’s entire life.
Ruth belongs to the Dorf, yet chafes against it. Her husband, Alan, does not understand her sense of humor. One of her children, a son, grows up and leaves the community. Occasionally, she experiences bouts of despair that confine her to bed for days, forcing the other members to do her chores for her.
Yet Ruth never tries to escape, even when the opportunity presents itself. She is habituated, yes, but she also believes in the mission of the place, in the project of glorifying God through the smallest acts of service humanly possible—baking pies, scrubbing floors. And as she says near the end of the story, surprising even herself, she is happy.
I found this all fascinating, and for a specific reason. Riley is unlike my mother in a multitude of ways, yet she still finds herself drawn to pondering the lives of these people, these women, trying on their own way of life for herself, seeing how it fits. Ruth’s life is incredibly circumscribed, yes, but it is orderly. Clean. Predictable. Dutiful. For duty, not freedom, is the defining feature of her life. She knows what it is expected of her every hour, even every minute, of the day, even if she fails to meet those expectations.
It is a fulfillment of the longing Fleabag famously confesses to, in the show of the same name. “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate.” My mother has never watched Fleabag and never will—Gilmore Girls is more her speed—yet this is sentiment that she, and Ruth, and Kate Riley, and countless other women are drawn toward, however much their feet may drag.
And what of the appeal of Ruth for a hopelessly male reader like myself? It is very funny, actually, in a rather dry way that I recognize. Ruth has a knack for sizing people up in an instant, and keeping those observations to herself. Considering the appearance of an improbably attractive woman in the midst of their modest commune, Roth observes:
Ruth took Colleen as profound evidence of something or other. She wasn’t envious, having long ago determined that her own appearance was merely sufficiently inoffensive, but the moral implications of Colleen’s face were troubling. Beauty was an argument, but for what?
The story is full of moments like this, sentences that equally recall comedies of manners and the Farmers Almanac. Indeed, the story is full of moments, more than scenes or sequences, suggesting that the moment is the constitutive element of a life. One moment laid after another, orderly, plain, bustling yet lonesome.