Wisconsin Death Trip

By Paul Gray

First novels seldom attract financial interest from Hollywood, but when they do, as in the case of Peter Benchley's Jaws or Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, the selling points tend to be strong characters and a plot long on tension and surprises. That's a fair description of Christina Schwarz's Drowning Ruth (Doubleday; 338 pages; $23.95), which probably explains why, even before its publication, Miramax bought the screen rights for director Wes Craven. Readers should not wait for the film version, though, because this unusually deft and assured first novel conveys a good deal more than thrills and chills.

There is, to be sure, a central and potentially grisly mystery set forth in the book's opening pages and resolved only at the end. In 1919, while serving as a nurse in a Milwaukee hospital for severely wounded soldiers, Amanda Starkey suffers some sort of nervous indisposition and goes home to rest at her parents' farm in rural Wisconsin. They have both recently died, victims of the 1918 flu epidemic. The only people living there now are Mathilda Neumann, Amanda's younger sister, and Mattie's three-year-old daughter Ruth. Carl Neumann, the husband and father, is still recovering in France from his wartime injuries. And then, suddenly, Mattie too is dead, having fallen through the ice on a nearby lake and drowned.

What happened? That, naturally, is what Carl wants to know when he gets back to the farm. But Amanda will answer only with generalities about some sort of skating accident: "Mattie was always taking chances, always doing things she shouldn't have done, things I told her not to do." Carl doesn't understand why his wife would have left Ruth with her aunt and gone skating on a November night or why Ruth, when he and she are standing together at Mattie's grave, mentions an "ice baby" that she remembers "when I drowned."

The greatest strength of Drowning Ruth is not its tension-building plot but rather its careful portrait of people who must get on with the daily business of living no matter how mystified they are by unanswered questions. Carl realizes that he has a farm to run and a daughter to raise. When Amanda, who has stayed on to become Ruth's surrogate mother, suffers a nervous breakdown and goes to a sanitarium for a year, he nearly loses control of his increasingly wild child. Only when Amanda returns does Ruth settle down and some semblance of normal family life begin.

Some of this evolving story is reflected through Amanda's mind, a smaller portion through Ruth's, and the rest through regular third-person narration. The transitions seem a little jumpy and awkward at first, but Schwarz soon finds a smooth rhythm of backing and forthing, one that forestalls certain disclosures without seeming excessively calculating or coy. As the years pass on the farm and in the small village nearby--the Great Depression in the outside world is manifested here only as collapsing milk prices--the hope arises that maybe there was no dark secret about Mattie's death or that the ripples from that long-ago drowning have grown still at last. And that may be Drowning Ruth's most artful illusion.

--By Paul Gray