I just cleaned out the fridge. If my family were here, we'd have to call the paramedics to treat them all for shock, because I detest this chore and usually my husband does it.

Nevertheless, after closing the last pages of Jane Hamilton's acclaimed and best-selling The Book of Ruth, I felt like I had to clean SOMEthing. Here is a full-length book that offers so little in the way of redemption at the end that I ended up feeling scummy and horrible. It's a book about a white-trash family, but the white-trashiness is not the source of the dirty feeling I came away with. The Book of Ruth, like Hamilton's Map of the World, takes you through the characters' lives as if everything is going to be okay, and then bludgeons you with horror and nastiness that's almost irredeemable. The scraps of hope Hamilton gives you at the end can't clean you up.

In contrast, I was given Orson Scott Card's Sarah to review some months ago. I read it right away and liked it very much, but had little to say that was fresh. Card deals with some pretty difficult themes, as Hamilton does. True, you can get a little tired of the precocious-child approach so often apparent in Card (at the beginning of the book, Sarah is 10 but talks like a 21-year-old).

Still, despite the sometimes difficult thematic material (a thoroughly detestable sister to Sarah; Sarah driven to temporary madness by her childlessness; the destruction of a city), Card treats everything with taste, decency and most of all, hope. Abraham handles his polygamy difficulties with gentleness and humanity (I was so glad Card drew him that way because I didn't want to lose Abraham as a hero). In the end, Abraham and Sarah deal with the complexities of tribal camp life with humanity and grace, and the book ends as if it were a beginining. You know that Card could have drawn graphic pictures of Sodom's immorality; you know he could have sensationalized the destruction of the city. He gave us just enough of the negative to KNOW, while keeping the story positive and engaging.

At this point in my life, I'd rather end up with hope. Map of the World seemed to me like a therapy session, and so did The Book of Ruth. Why do readers love these books enough to make them bestsellers? I have no answer. . . . but I think that Card's Sarah points a better way, to great storytelling with redemption and hope at the end.

I did my Masters in American Literature many years ago; I was young, a member of the poor-me generation that often wallowed in its literary miseries. Even so, at the end of the degree, I was pretty sick of all that downer literature. We love a good story, and there's plenty of misery in the world to write about, but every year I get less and less tolerant of the bludgeony type of story we find in The Book of Ruth.

It's easier to write misery than real life laced with hope and end up with a story that keeps readers reading. Card pulls it off in Sarah and points the way for LDS authors to try and do the same.

Cathy (Gileadi) Wilson
Editing Etc.
1400 West 2060 North
Helper UT 84526