Review: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life / By Rod Dreher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Here's the thing I want you to know about Rod Dreher: He evokes a loving but imperfect family in rural Louisiana, a bucolic oasis along the Mississippi River that paradoxically threatens to drown him in his youth, a life-changing experience at the Cathedral de Chartres near Paris, a brush with death on 9/11, a career climb through the corridors of big-city journalism, a spiritual search along orthodox and unorthodox paths, the small miracles of marriage, the burdens and joys of fatherhood, and the crushing saga of a sister who won't survive cancer, a sister who is the cement of this entire memoir devoted to a search for meaning in contemporary life. Dreher evokes all this wonderfully, and through the binding love of his sister for her community, through the community's reciprocal, abounding love for her -- through this crucible of community, tragedy and celebration emerges a perfect book.
Oh, Dreher might have included a bit less of himself, as some have suggested, he might have chased fewer rabbits in his spiritual hunt, he might have made his sister's illness a subtext to grander themes -- but he would have missed the magic of Ruthie Leming's little way, her pathway to a life beautifully lived. Dreher's reportorial zeal in seeking out his schoolteacher sister's character -- from family, students, colleagues and friends -- elevates the story. There's not a lazy bone in this full-bodied, flesh-and-blood examination of what makes families and communities tick.
Though the Dreher home place resides in the unincorporated community of Starhill, the cultural center of this memoir is St. Francisville, the historic river community with deep ties to the antebellum South and avian artist John J. Audubon.
It's a beautiful place of green hills and clay bluffs, one of my favorite places in the world, but it's also a place of incongruities. A generation ago, The New York Times fixed upon St. Francisville and its county-level jurisdiction, West Feliciana Parish, as a gold-digger's dream: 212 men for every 100 women, the best odds for Miss Lonely Heart in the entire nation. Then came the deflation: More than half the men were full-time residents of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the largest prison, geographically, in the U.S. It's a place that's fiercely fought commercial progress of a kind. Though West Feliciana is home to a massive prison and a nuclear power plant, many of the Starhill faithful fought off a mixed-used development recently that would have buoyed the parish's tax base with new housing and retail stores near the foot of the Western Hemisphere's longest cable-stayed bridge, the $409 million John James Audubon Bridge.
From my vantage point 30 miles south in Baton Rouge, such opposition didn't make sense. But a recent visit to St. Francisville reminded my wife and me that Ruthie's little way, writ large across the community, is a thing worth protecting from threats real and perceived. We stayed at our favorite bed & breakfast, K.W. Kennon's Shade Tree Inn, a rustic but luxurious hillside retreat in the same neighborhood where Rod Dreher now lives. At the coffee shop in the town center, we enjoyed a Bird Man Blast and later dined at the Magnolia Cafe, where Baby and the Boomers played a kaleidoscopic mix of George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dwight Yoakum and Van Morrison hits for patrons aged eight months to 82 years.
Upon departing Sunday, we drove down Royal Street and I spied through the open doors of the venerable First United Methodist Church sanctuary a sight of standing bodies singing their final hymn. An iridescent light filled the stained glass behind the altar, where Ruthie Dreher's friends kept an all-night vigil before her 2011 funeral.
As chance would have it, we forgot our reading material at the Shade Tree Inn when we left. After picking up our cat at my mother's house in a neighboring town, we stopped back in St. Francisville. I knocked on the kitchen door of the Shade Tree Inn and K.W. Kennon was reading The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. He'd been planning to buy a copy and had become transfixed by reading ours.
"You know, Rod's a great writer," said K.W., the son of a former Louisiana governor.
Indeed, he is. If I read something grander than this book this year or next, or even in the next decade, I shall consider myself as rich as Ruthie Leming herself.
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