|
|
By Christina Schwarz
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 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.
|
