Love in its many permutations is the theme of the latest novel by Minneapolis writer Faith Sullivan — familial love, parental love, but mostly romantic love, and tragic romantic love at that.
The book is populated with salt-of-the-earth, sensible characters — farm wives and schoolteachers and small-town merchants and cranky elderly aunts — and just about every one of them is hiding a broken heart.
Set in the early 1900s, "Ruby & Roland" is told in first person by Ruby Drake, orphaned at age 10 when her parents die in a blizzard. Her fanciful mother and handsome father were, she says, "too happy and devoted to live." And so it goes in this novel — the happy might die young, but everyone else just presses on, doomed love and heartbreak notwithstanding.
Ruby's voice is peppy and thoughtful — with her literary quotations and romantic flights of fancy, she brings to mind the character Anne Shirley from "Anne of Green Gables" — but this brief novel contains an awful lot of sadness.
After her parents' death, Ruby spends her teenage years working as a hired girl on the Schoonover farm outside of Harvester, the little Minnesota town where most of Sullivan's books are set. There she meets Roland Allen, the strapping young farmer across the road whose hair is white-blond and whose eyes are "the intense blue of bachelor's buttons."
But Roland is no bachelor — he is married to a town girl, the beautiful but self-absorbed Dora, who has just lost their first child and has taken to her bed in despair.
The attraction between Ruby and Roland is instantaneous and passionate. But would this relationship, if allowed to run its natural course, wither over time? Roland seems neither well-read nor particularly interesting, and Ruby's passion for him might well spring from a combination of loneliness, sexual attraction and romanticism.
But passion it is, and passion, Sullivan makes clear, is not to be discounted.
