Book review: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming by Rod Dreher

The twelfth book I read in 2016 was The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher. Dreher is a journalist and critic whose talent and ambition took him far away from the small Louisiana town where he grew up.  As he moved from success to success, he paid occasional visits back home to his family and was reasonably justified in feeling that he was the prodigy, the fortunate son, the success, while his sister "settled" for an ordinary life as a schoolteacher, wife, and mother.  Then his sister, Ruthie Leming, was diagnosed with cancer.

What do you want me to say?  She dies.  The sister dies.  This isn't a spoiler; you know this from the time you pick up the book and read the back cover.  There's no suspense about it.  If you want to read a book about someone fighting a losing battle, from the time she's blindsided with the diagnosis to the moment when the tumor abruptly severs an artery and she bleeds out in her husband's arms, this is your book, though, frankly, if that were all this was, I'd question your mental health for wanting to.

But the book isn't just about Ruthie's struggle; much more it's about her community rallying around her to support her family, a community that her cosmopolitan brother has spent most of his life looking down on, if benevolently.  It makes his question his own choices in life: to remain rootless, chasing the brass ring of success.  If it were he, or his wife or children, seriously ill, he realizes he hasn't made the intimate connections Ruthie had that enclosed her family in a web of love and care.

But the book isn't just a Hallmark card to small towns, either.  All the time Rod has been implicitly judging his sister for taking the easy road, for having no ambition and failing to dream big, he discovers that Ruthie has likewise been judging him: as an egghead intellectual who thinks he's better than his relatives back home.  One of the most heartbreaking realizations in the book is when , after Rod believes he and Ruthie have cleared the air and buried the hatchet before her death, he realizes that she has continued to denigrate him behind his back to her children.

Rod moves home, partly to help take care of Ruthie's daughters, but equally as much to try to repair his strained relationships with his family and to try to gain for his own wife and children the sense of belonging and community which supported Ruthie's family in their time of crisis.  This is not an easy fix or a guaranteed happy ending.  But a moment when Rod's sense that his father sees him as a failure for leaving is revealed as a result of his father's own guilt over not breaking away from a toxic family situation is breathtaking.