The day would begin at 5:30 or six. As a single woman living with an unrelated family, Kate Riley, a 25-year-old New Yorker who gave up city life for communal Christian living, would wake up and help get breakfast ready. She, the two parents, and their teenage children would gather at the table, where they might sing a song and say a prayer. Next was a part of the day called Start, during which everyone would do a chore unrelated to their regular chores — and then the regular chores would take up the next few hours. She might clean the cafeteria kitchen, or dig part of a trench, or work on landscaping.
Afterward was lunch; then, because she was so unused to the physical and social labor of the community, Riley was allowed the privilege of a few hours to be by herself. “I was, they quickly realized, overwhelmed by the metabolic demands of being around people,” she told me recently from her farm in Virginia. Later in the day, though, she’d be given something else to do. “They came up with a list of jobs for me because I had so few practical skills to offer.”
This is the world that inspired her first novel, Ruth, set within a Christian communal organization with outposts — in the book they’re called Dorfs — in several countries. (It sounds a little like the Anabaptist Bruderhof communities, founded in Germany in 1920 and expelled by the Nazis in 1937, but Riley demurs when I ask her where, exactly, she was living for the year she spent “going to grad school for scrubbing floors,” as she describes it.) Unlike Riley, the protagonist, Ruth Della Scholl, is a lifer, born within the community in 1963 Gracefield, Michigan. Possessions and money are shared, food meted out by committee depending on family size, clothing prescribed by those in charge of sewing. Questions like “Should children pray?” are discussed at three-hour sessions in the Meeting Hall, and major decisions are made by a set of elders headed by someone called the Servant and his wife, seemingly benign authority figures who appear to know what’s best for everyone.
Ruth is a granular portrait of a truly collective place that sometimes reads like a sidelong assessment of our lonely, technologically fractured time. It is also its own thing entirely. It’s full of small jokes, the kind traded over hot-cross-bun dough before breakfast: In a New York Times review, Dwight Garner said “I suspect it will become an underground classic of American folk wit.” A brief section might be about Ruth being assigned to edit down the community songbook, which “had grown bloated in recent years,” or it might describe a crushing period of postpartum depression or the appearance of a new community member, “a zealous toad of a man” from “a candle-making co-op in Yakima.” Like the best novels of everyday life, it’s strikingly ambivalent, folding in all the moral unclarity and dissatisfaction that even people who pray, sing, and labor without complaint might feel on a Tuesday morning. Reality inserts itself: A moment of private existential grief might be interrupted by an aimless discussion of geranium care. It can seem, alternately, like an injustice and a solace that Ruth is constantly being called away from her interior world to something outside herself.
It’s unlike anything I’ve read in a long time. That might in part be because, in Riley’s telling, she didn’t have ambitions of becoming an author. Ruth began as a series of emails she wrote on an iPod Touch to her friend Molly Young (a former New York Magazine book critic) as a way to convey the “tremendous experience” she had just had and the ideas it had left her with; it was published in an earlier small-run form by Young and her husband, Teddy Blanks, as Miriam. The community was radically different from the place where she was born, and hearing her talk about her path there and back is a little mind-bending. Growing up in Manhattan, on Bleecker Street and Bowery, Riley, now 38, had what she describes as complete freedom, with “very little oversight or correction from my parents,” a former literary agent and a lawyer. She was taught that happiness was her right, but it remained elusive: “I was just so good at making myself not happy.”
As a college student studying philosophy at Yale, she was frustrated with the way it seemed that “the most convincing and persuasive people, the people who could argue so beautifully about ethical behavior, were in real life just pieces of shit.” There seemed to be no connection between having good ideas about morality and being a good person. Disenchanted, she dropped out before graduating, trained as an EMT, and became closely involved with the Catholic Worker, an anarchist Christian charity association, where she volunteered at a shelter. It was there that she first met people from the community she would eventually join. “I was fascinated,” she says. She started visiting them and then decided to stay. Her friends and family weren’t too surprised: “It was not my first oblique life decision.”
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Her months there, she says, were “some of the best times in my life.” She still thinks being in community is ultimately the right way to live, but she came to believe that it would be impossible for her to exist that way permanently. “I was raised with the sort of relentless message that the only thing that was valuable about me was my individuality and creativity, and to be among a population that had received the exact opposite message and had, to the degree that it was possible, been raised without ego …” she trails off, looking concerned. “I felt so constantly embarrassed to not be a natural at it.” Things like needing permission or accompaniment to walk around in a city, for instance, were bizarre to her. She left, and back in New York, she struggled to adjust. “I had basically told everybody in my real life, ‘Hey guys, I figured out the exact right thing to do. I’m going to go there forever — peace, good-bye.’” More embarrassment; more discomfort; more grasping at being a “good person,” this time mostly alone again.
Before long, she decided to leave the city once more, moving to a farm in rural Virginia without a driver’s license or almost any contacts in the area. Partially, it was that she had decided that “if I couldn’t do community right, then I didn’t know how to be around people at all.” There, she raises birds, more than 300 of them — chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea fowl, emu — “just every sort of bird that you can imagine.” Although her farm is the opposite of communal, she finds it good in a similar way to bear responsibility for other living things. “I really like having something to take care of,” she says. “Nobody needs more funny emails. But needing to provide food and water to these things or they will die, needing to get them into their coops at night or they will be eaten by foxes — having nonnegotiable obligations is really helpful to me.” At her book-launch party in Brooklyn this Tuesday, wearing an un-Dorf-like sequin minidress showing the black-out tattoos that spread across her arms and legs, she reiterated how uneasy it makes her feel to be in New York.
When I started reading Ruth, I wasn’t sure what I was encountering. Was this a tradwife fantasy or a story of awakening and escape? A Handmaid’s Tale or Women Talking? Ruth’s eventual marriage, to a man named Alan, is often stifling. (She loves wordplay and he likes math; in many ways, they seem like a simple categorical mismatch.) “I will say that some of the most funny, confident, self-actualized women I have ever met were in that community,” Riley says when I ask her about how patriarchy figures into the novel and the real-life place. It is not a perfectly egalitarian system, she thinks, and there are superficially evident ways in which life is different for men and women. But “no woman ever has to worry about her husband being damaged by pornography. No woman there ever has to worry about her appearance.” And the version of being a girl or woman in New York that she experienced, she says, can itself be “full of horrors.” Ultimately, Young thinks, Ruth is an ideas novel that uses this model of co-living to tease out the big anxieties of our time, the way our sense of connection has deteriorated. “It’s quite smart to choose that setting and that community and that time period to think about questions of alienation and loneliness and intimacy,” she says.
As the book goes on, a succession of people filter in and out. The world is surprisingly politically diverse, drawing from all kinds of fringe efforts at living. There are hippies, homesteaders, Amish neighbors, young people who leave and come back or leave and don’t. At one point, a charismatic fellow student at the community college where Ruth studies culinary arts briefly tries to spring her: “You’ve got to get out of here. You can stay with my family as long as you need.” Here it is, I thought. But life goes on. The chores need to be done. Ruth stays.
Riley tells me she had to argue for the author bio on the back flap of Ruth, one last oblique quip in the style of Ruth herself. It reads, “Kate Riley was raised in New York City. This is her last book.” If she were to publish again, she thinks her writing process would have to take the same form: a series of correspondence to one person — someone she trusts will understand what she’s trying to say — because there’s something she wants or needs to tell them. For now, she’s focused on her birds and on living well away from New York. And anyway, “it’s not like the world lacks for masterpieces,” she says. “There are so many ways to write the perfect book.”
