[In the following review, Paterson examines the elements of classical tragedy in The Book of Ruth.]

In a return to be welcomed, love and God seem to be making their way back into fiction. Jane Hamilton's passionate and adroit first novel, The Book of Ruth, seldom shows the hand of the beginner as she unravels the tragedy of a young woman's inability to reconcile her love for her sweet, slightly deranged husband, Ruby, and her loyalty to her mother, May, a mean-spirited woman driven half-mad by a lifetime of emotional deprivation.

Ruth Dahl's troubles begin long before she is born. May's first husband dies in World War II, leaving his bride without hope of happiness. Fifteen years later she marries Ruth's father, Elmer, in as joyless a coupling as you are likely to find in fiction. Elmer stays until Ruth is 10 years old and her science-wizard brother is 12. As the dumb kid sister of the brother May worships in a kind of parody of her feelings for her lost love, the girl becomes little more than a servant and emotional punching bag in her mother's house.

Ruth is saved from the semi-literate banality of her peers by a librarian aunt and a blind woman who teaches her the classics of literature on tape, and by her own sacramental view of nature and human existence. Thus she gropes toward adulthood, a passive and inchoate young woman torn between her mother's warped views and a growing sense of herself as someone who deserves better. The internal conflict finally erupts in violence between May and Ruby—each spellbound by the evil in the other.

Tragic in the classical sense, the book leaves the heroine standing upright in a fallen world. She has lost the two people she thought she couldn't live without and gained the right to her own life and the love of her infant son.

Jane Hamilton's ambitious and satisfying first novel asks one of literature's biggest questions: what is the meaning of human suffering? In the end, she gives the old answer—to expose the truth and teach forgiveness.