Book World: Carolyn See reviews 'Ruby's Spoon' by Anna Lawrence Pietroni

RUBY'S SPOON

By Anna Lawrence Pietroni

Spiegel & Grau. 366 pp. $26

For years I've dreamed of using Bertolt Brecht's million-dollar word "verfremdungseffekt" in a modest book review, and now I've found the perfect excuse. Anna Lawrence Pietroni puts verfremdungseffekt to extremely good use in her creepy, complex first novel. This "distancing effect," as it is often translated, is introduced to jolt playgoers back into mundane reality when things onstage get a little too intense.

And just so, in "Ruby's Spoon," in 1933, the inhabitants of the bleak, English town of Cradle Cross speak a dialect that is both baffling and arcane: "Yoom thick wi um, ay yo?" stops us in our tracks. That's actually fine because it keeps us from being absolutely terrified at the thought of a helpless little boy, for instance, tied up on a cliff with the raging sea below: "I heard him calling out before I see him," his older sister says. "Blindfolded, he was, and ten feet from the cliff edge, and calling out for me. On his knees and elbows, inching forward, his fingers stretched before him feeling for the grass, and filament tied tight around his wrists."

"Ruby's Spoon" has more than one helpless child in physical, mental and spiritual danger. You don't want to be reading this book late at night.

Cradle Cross is a crummy, landlocked little island, far enough inland that the water surrounding it isn't even brackish. Its canals are stagnant, filled with rusty machinery, rotting trash, thick layers of diesel oil and plenty of old, stinking human sewage. The town on the island is an industrial pest hole, with factories that make chains and nails (the workingmen are forced to retire after fires and super-heated metal sear their eyeballs into blindness). The other industry here is buttons, mostly made out of the bones that remain after the meat and fat of cattle have been rendered and roasted and melted away. The stench around the town is unbearable.

What passes for amusement is minimal indeed. The main pastime seems to be standing in line at the bakery, run by a mother and daughter who produce bread and custards. Restaurant food is provided by a tiny fried-fish shop, where even little bits of fried batter are thriftily consumed, as well as fish and chips, salted and served up in wax paper. There's one bar in town and a couple of churches, and that's it except for a grief-support group called the Ruths and the Naomis, made up of widows who lost their husbands in the war and mothers who lost their children to influenza or any number of misfortunes. The whole town of Cradle Cross seems to be in mourning.

Thirteen-year-old Ruby Tailor works in the fish shop for Captin, a 50-year-old bachelor whose mission in life is to provide the town with clean and decent meals. She lives with her grandmother, Nan Annie, a cruel nut case who's driven off her own son, who lives alone now on another island, across a filthy causeway. Ruby can see her dad but never touch him; she's strictly forbidden to cross water or go into water or get wet in any way except for her weekly bath. Ruby's grandfather, Jonah, and her young aunt Grace were lost years before in a dreadful shipwreck. After the war, Ruby's father took her on a trip across the English Channel. There was an awful storm, and though Ruby and her father survived, his recklessness got him kicked out of his house and still keeps Ruby in constant trouble.

The action here takes place over two weeks. A mysterious woman named Isa Fly turns up in Cradle Cross, and by the end of 14 days she has irritated so many people in so many ways that she almost ends up being burned as a witch. (She is searching for two mysterious strangers whom the villagers know nothing of and care less about.) Meanwhile, the town's button factory has been inherited by a young woman who might close it, which would bring immediate ruin to the town.

The townsfolk can't stand this possibility. Waves of senseless crime and vandalism break out. The half-finished mural in the town bakery is smeared with lard. Linens embroidered by the Ruths and the Naomis to commemorate their loved ones are first stolen and then fouled. Ruby, tortured by her awful grandmother, plots desperately to leave. Spiteful mermaids rise from water and taunt their counterparts on land. Cradle Cross becomes a prison with no escape, and the reader gets up in the night to be sure the door is locked. "Ruby Spoon" is infused with terror that no amount of verfremdungseffekt can budge.

Just a wonderful novel!