Ruth

by Jeremy Cooper

RUTH

Hardcover

Published November 13, 1986

About the author

Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of six previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum's catalogue of artists' postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC's Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won
the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak.

Reviews

[Felicity · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jeremy Cooper's first novel begins inauspiciously with a pen-portrait of Ruth, 'leaning forward, sticking out her bottom, her woollen skirt pushed up by the bulging satin cushion. She had a biggish bottom and a broad back.' Even as a child, we are told, she was fat and clumsy, lacking the grace and agility of other girls with their 'bony little bottoms'. While Ruth is engrossed in her painting, the author seems mesmerised by her spreading rump, implying either fetish or phobia about gross female flesh. Disadvantaged by her thick legs, 'flabby white thighs' wide mouth and disfiguring facial hair, poor Ruth is yet another incarnation of the legendary 'fat white woman whom nobody loves'. Had I not known that Cooper's later fiction excels in its sensitive depiction of solitary subjects, I would probably have abandoned this one well before the decline in her mental health. In a case of nomen omen -- the name prefiguring her destiny -- the Naomi to whom the biblical Ruth pledges her loyalty is replaced by the fictional Ruth's widowed mother: 'whither thou goest, I will go with you' becomes the dutiful daughter's commitment to remain with her mother in the family home. The tension in the mother-daughter relationship is well established, long suspected by the reader but confirmed only after the assaults have taken place, registered with clinical precision, as if recorded in her hospital notes. If the novel is a painful book to read, as one early reviewer maintained, it is because there is no pleasure in watching the fat white woman fulfil her writer's destiny.

[Brian Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange one this, in more ways than one. It tells the harrowing story of an eccentric, childlike female artist's battle with her destructive inner demons, but it's not a novel as such, because it's based on the life of someone I once knew. The book made it's way to me through an ex-girlfriend via a remarkable set of coincidences, and gave me a distinct chill as I recognised the painting on the cover. Even more oddly, the early chapters of the book describe a painting the fictional artist is working on, and it's the same picture the real artist gave me a print of when I visited her studio. Spine-tingling. However, I was bothered by the fact that the cover painting is unacknowledged, and I was left with a feeling that there was something unethical about the way the author had plundered this woman's achingly sad life without any proper recognition of her.