56 pages • 1 hour read
Jane HamiltonThe Book of Ruth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The narrator, Ruth Grey, invites the reader into her town of Honey Creek, Illinois, where she lives with her mother (whom she calls “May”). Honey Creek is a town close to the border of Wisconsin (where Ruth has never been), full of clapboard houses, small schools, a cinder block factory, and river with a mill that no longer operates. Ruth is a well-meaning young girl who acknowledges her developmental disabilities. Her father, Elmer, left the family to live with his brother in Texas when she was only 10 years old. Ruth’s simple life experiences include watching a local cowhand as he shepherds his cows down the road and playing make-believe games with her hens. Her happiest childhood memory took place on the hottest day of the year, when melted ice cream splashed onto her head and her entire family—including her father, Elmer, her mother, May, and her brother, Matt—laughed and treated her like a celebrity. Ruth understands from the faces of families emerging from Sunday church services that sometimes everyone is this happy.
Chapter 2 Summary
Ruth recounts her learning difficulties as a child, which are thrown into high relief by her brother, Matt, whose precocious abilities (particularly in math) were recognized even from a young age. Because of his superior intellect, Matt generally determined the rules for the childhood dress-up games they played and received accolades from his teachers, while Ruth received only insults from both her teachers and May, who questioned why she was born “retarded.”
Ruth recalls taking comfort in abusing Matt physically, which, she notes, became harder to do once they entered school. Ruth remembers that other girls bullied her in elementary school, claiming that touching Ruth would infect them with a disease (to which one Diane Crawford had the antidote). Her chief confidante during these years was her Aunt Sid, who lived 40 minutes away. During time allotted in school to write to pen pals, Ruth writes to her Aunt Sid (against whom May bears a grudge for having taken more than her share of family heirlooms after the passing of a deceased relative). Aunt Sid always returned her letters, though their correspondence was a secret.
Chapter 3 Summary
Ruth relates the information conveyed to her by her Aunt Sid about her mother’s childhood. The oldest of eight children (several of whom died before adulthood, and one of whom was born deaf), May was deprived of attention as a child. She went to live with her aunts at the age of three. Often compared unfavorably to her younger siblings, May was in charge of the household laundry, a task that permitted her to attend school only a few days per week.
Ruth wonders whether May’s unfortunate fate owes simply to being born on an ominous day. Ruth’s wild imagination allows her to imagine the clothing flapping on the clothesline in mockery of May. According to Aunt Sid, who used to spy on her older sister, May once had a suitor named Willard Jensen who had attractive dark hair and blue eyes. Willard is drafted during World War II, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and May returns to her family’s farm during his absence and continues to tend the cows and the laundry. She watches grudgingly as her sister Marion marries Frank Bane, whose poor eyesight makes him ineligible for the draft. Finally, May’s family receives a telegram stating that Willard died while fighting bravely in combat.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The Book of Ruth belongs to a category of fiction that attempts to showcase the world from the point of view of an individual who lives on the margins of society. In this case, Ruth’s marginalization from society owes to her developmental disabilities. She is called “delayed” by her brother Matt, and her mother, May, questions why Ruth was born “retarded.” Ruth’s awareness of her own intellectual and physical shortcomings—“my eyes are squinched together; they’re small and gray and they don’t open all the way wide” (12)—make the novel especially poignant. The second chapter is almost exclusively devoted to providing a glimpse into May’s formative years (particularly second and third grade). Ruth is mocked brutally by her peers and finds respite only when a girl (who has misaligned eyes and an injury resulting in difficulty walking) moves to town and distracts the public’s attention from her.
Chapter 3 shows May’s experience in parallel to that of her daughter, Ruth, as explained in Chapter 2. May’s upbringing (narrated through the lens of Ruth) strikes the reader as equally tragic. In May’s case, the tragedy owes to her being ignored and overworked by her large family rather than to a genetic or physical disability. Ruth, despite her intellectual disability, can discern May’s misfortune, but she expresses curiosity about rather than sympathy for her mother’s circumstances: “maybe there was a bad omen on her birthday, somewhere, and no one paid attention, like on the worst day of my life I saw a whole slew of birds on a telephone wire, hanging upside down by their feet. They were murdered by the current” (30). Ruth’s notes on omens and the way she relates her mother’s tragic history mirror her later interest in literature, specifically the dark, fate-centered works of Charles Dickens. Ruth often tells her story and the stories of those around her as though everyone’s a character in a novel.
Ruth’s disability allows to keep an emotional distance from the events and circumstances she relates. Her stream-of-consciousness narration style further affords insights into Ruth’s appraisal of the natural and spiritual world. When May attempts to satisfy Ruth’s curiosity about how she was born, she states that, “I liked the idea of floating around and then changing into a baby, in the dark, in secret, but I got gloomy when I thought maybe it was my choice that put me in May’s belly” (14).
Ruth also appears as a somewhat unreliable narrator; though she has a low opinion of her intelligence based on her family’s interactions with her, her narration is articulate and perceptive. Things that she will think less of herself for, like dancing later in the novel, are perfectly normal to the reader. This juxtaposition of what the reader sees versus what Ruth and other characters say about her suggests that Ruth may not actually have an intellectual disability.
The reader is likely to question whether Ruth's family circumstances have affected or exacerbated her disposition. She acknowledges that her father generally “stayed out of the way” (15), even before he left the family’s Illinois home to live with his brother in Texas. Ruth admits to beating her brother physically, asserting that her strength lay in her muscles while his intellect was marked superior to hers. Ruth furthermore consistently refers to May by her first name, rather than “mother,” a preference which may owe to her difficulties forging intimate connections. Nevertheless, Ruth’s narration is punctuated by moments of empathy, particularly for animals and the natural world. She recalls one occasion during which she saw a lamb being born: “I loved seeing the quiet face; the lamb didn’t even know it was being born” (20). This is one of many instances throughout the novel where Ruth will refer to the natural world and compare it to her own circumstances.
Ruth’s experiences are limited with respect to geography and mental capacity. These limitations imbue her narration with a certain relevance and trenchant perspective. Ruth is more inclined both to notice qualities in others as well as make speculations about the natural world and human nature itself: “It seems as if nobody could really be all bad, although everyone has the meanness in them” (10).
