56 pages • 1 hour read
Jane HamiltonThe Book of Ruth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
During Ruth’s final year of high school, Miss Finch enters a nursing home. Ruth continues to visit her, though she notices and laments the loss of Miss Finch’s mental faculties. Ruth remembers her high school graduation, an occasion she shared with Matt in the spring of 1973. Having graduated at the top of his class, Matt gives a graduation speech in which he criticizes President Nixon and the Vietnam War, alienating several parents in the audience. Nevertheless, Ruth comments on how well spoken and knowledgeable he appears, despite his acne, his only perceptible flaw. Mrs. Foote’s daughter Daisy graduates, too, a feat which Ruth attributes to a teacher’s fascination with her.
After the graduation ceremony, May haughtily dismisses Mrs. Foote’s invitation to dine together in favor of joining a teacher and the families of other promising graduates. Matt is going to MIT, while one of his schoolmates, Diane Crawford, is going to Smith College. Ruth loathes the experience of going out with this group because she can tell that the people question how she and Matt could be related. Ruth admits that she knows nothing about Boston, only that it is 1,000 miles away, a distance she cannot fathom.
Matt attends a summer math program in New York, where he earns a stipend, but he never sends May any money. Ruth knows at this point that Matt is gone forever. He sends her only a few postcards and shares little about his life, except for the fact that he plans to spend the summer doing research in Boston, and that he lives with a man named Virgil King. May is not only suspicious that Virgil is a Black man, but she also, according to Ruth’s observations, becomes devastated by Matt’s absence every time she does not having something to distract her. May makes up details about Matt’s experience at MIT, feigning a closeness with him to her Honey Creek community.
After graduation, Ruth joins her mother as a finisher at the local dry cleaners, Trim ‘N Tidy. She observes the variety of the people who come in, including stoical farmers and sophisticated ladies. Ruth hastens in her work to avoid thinking about the likelihood of working at the Trim ‘N Tidy all of her life. Mrs. Foote visits May often at work, while Ruth listens to stories about Daisy’s exploits with a man in Kentucky. Ruth remarks that her relationship with her mother has improved during the year following graduation, owing to the fact that they only have one another.
Ruth misses the structure of life without school, but she joins the Trim ‘N Tidy bowling league at the behest of her boss, Artie. May and occasionally Miss Foot and Daisy play on the team, too. Miss Foote brings her son, Randall, who continues to annoy Ruth with his obsequious manner and eating habits. Miss Foote’s husband dies suddenly from kidney failure, and Ruth notices how Daisy shows little remorse at the funeral.
Chapter 8 Summary
Ruth gets a bowling ball from the Footes for her birthday. Calling it her “blackie ball,” she considers it a source of good luck. Before bowling, she recites the New Testament line, “in the beginning was the Word,” though she thinks it is silly. Randy Foote, who consistently accompanies his mother whenever she visits the Greys, has taken to making more overt attempts at a romance at Ruth, to which Ruth reacts with disgust.
Meanwhile, Ruth’s bowling skills earn her the attention of Daisy, for whom Ruth has a quasi-sexual fascination that she likens to her attraction to her former teacher, Miss Pin. Daisy is put on probation for drinking and driving in addition to physical assaults. When Daisy joins the bowling contests, she acts ostentatiously. When out to dinner at a local restaurant after a bowling tournament, Daisy tells Ruth that she likes how Ruth doesn’t talk too much, nor does she put her on a pedestal. Daisy tells Ruth that she plans either to go into television broadcasting or beauty school, but that she would always do Ruth’s makeup for free.
One night near Independence Day, Daisy convinces Ruth to escape to a local beach. Daisy steals a boat, only to encounter a man fast asleep with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. When he awakens, Daisy addresses him as Ruby. Ruth is immediately infatuated by him, but she refuses to ask Daisy about him, preferring to create an idealized image of him in her mind.
After disappearing suddenly from Ruth’s bowling match, Ruby unexpectedly shows up at the Trim ‘N Tidy. He invites Ruth for a drink after work, an invitation to which May begrudgingly assents. As a result of drinking, Ruth gradually loses her inhibitions, revealing her candid and juvenile thoughts about nature, especially how much she likes the sound of spring peepers. Ruby in turn explains that he worked at a gas station before being unjustly fired. Before driving her home, Ruby rapes Ruth in the car. This act both scares and confuses her, as she imagined Ruby to be her perfect match. Ruth believes that even Aunt Sid’s letters, which spoke of a beautiful life force, were disingenuous
Chapter 9 Summary
Daisy visit Ruth at the Trim ‘N Tidy and can almost immediately discern that she has lost her virginity to Ruby. She counsels Ruth through her confusion, and she offers to take her out for ice cream. Though Ruth can tell that Daisy has had no serious partnerships in her life, Ruth appreciates her friendship. Particularly, she appreciates Daisy’s testimony that Ruby thought she was a “hot little number” (119). Ruth is conflicted by her attraction to Ruby. On the one hand, Ruby’s attraction flatters her, but on the other hand, she feels deceived by his immediate sexual predation. Daisy reassures her that Ruby genuinely likes her, and so he should be forgiven for his transgression. Daisy also explains that she knows Ruby by virtue of their having attended an obligatory drunk driving course together.
Three weeks after their first encounter, Ruby re-appears at the Trim ‘N Tidy. Though Ruth is smitten by him, she musters all of her courage to tell him that she is not ready for his “one-eyed snake.”
Ruth asks May if she can invite Ruby bowling, and she can tell by May’s dismissive attitude that May is afraid both of getting older, and of Ruth leaving her without anyone to care for her. May caustically cautions Ruth not to get pregnant while being unmarried.
Meanwhile, Ruth imagines Mr. Darcy, up to this point the perfect man in her eyes, appearing the way that Ruby appears, with rotten teeth. Ruth tells Ruby that she loves him as a means of consoling him during a vulnerable moment in which he questions what happens after death. Ruby is elated to hear this, and he proposes marriage to her with a ring he bought at Green Stamps. Ruth enthusiastically assents, thinking she could have died at that moment.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
These chapters witness Ruth’s coming-of-age into adulthood. She begins working full-time at a job which she fears will be her lifelong fate. Ruth, though she had a challenging upbringing, witnesses especially harsh realities of adulthood. Specifically, she witnesses the entire life cycle from various angles. For example, Dee Dee Foote’s youngest daughter, Lou, is ostracized for having a baby out of wedlock (which makes May feel socially superior to her friend). Ruth also witnesses her employer Miss Finch’s mental and physical degeneration, which results in her being transferred to a nursing home. Despite what Ruth herself acknowledges to be a dismal human condition (exacerbated by her first unwilling sexual encounter) she allows herself to be romanced by Ruby. She surrenders herself to him without reserve, because he is the first man who has recognized “feminine lure” within her.
Ruth’s interactions with Ruby again reveal her low self-esteem brought on by her mother’s degrading comments. The little positive attention that she receives from Ruby, even though he rapes her, is enough to convince her she’s in love. Ruth also discovers her sexuality in other ways. She admits to wanting to be in Daisy’s gym class so that she can see her in the shower, implying that Ruth is either gay or bisexual.
Female’s dependence on men, and its opposite, female liberation, is an enduring theme in this section of the novel. May cannot grapple with Matt’s absence, an absence which continues to haunt her. For example, when May begins to dance to the radio at home with Ruth, she suddenly stops as though she saw the ghost of “Matt, standing in the hall with his high, smart judgment” (103). This moment suggests that May, in holding Matt up as superior to Ruth, also considers him her own superior.
Ruth’s maturation is represented by her distance from the female mentors in her life, not only from May, but also from her Aunt Sid. Ruth suspects her aunt is disappointed in her for failure to have kept up with her reading. Meanwhile, she no longer has an intellectual counterpart in Miss Finch, and she finds herself spending time with Daisy.
Ruth sees Daisy in both a negative light as a promiscuous woman and in a positive light as a worldly, guiding peer. The reader, however, instantly recognizes that Ruth has headed down a dangerous path in associating with Daisy, who gets into altercations, drives drunk, and encourages Ruth to pursue a relationship with her rapist. Through these interactions, Hamilton reveals Ruth’s naïve eagerness to belong and foreshadows the novel’s tragic climax.
Though this section witnesses a major turning point in Ruth’s maturation, her thoughts remain punctuated by imaginative and humorous interjections, such as “all that you’d see if Daisy melted would be a patch of green eyeshadow on the carpet” (110). Daisy is an apt foil for Ruth; though she is ostensibly more mature and infinitely more experienced in the worldly sense, Ruth’s cautious approach to the world is decidedly more mature that Daisy’s.
The motif of literature appears again in this section, as Ruth likens her visceral reaction to Ruby to Madame Bovary’s “hot juicy flashes”(121). Ruth learns to love herself only by imagining herself as a famous heroine, such as Elizabeth Bennett or Emma Bovary. Though her understanding of these characters is perhaps superficial, these literary figures give Ruth a sort of roadmap, however idealistic, to life.
At the close of select chapters, Ruth continues to ponder the nature of her existence as well as her place in the universe. She states, “I wonder if there was someone like me on another planet, if they had dry cleaners up there, and winters coming on, and the symbol and myth of Jesus Christ” (104). Ruth’s narration evidences both the personality of a curious child and also of a cerebral philosopher. Though her analogies are immature and even laughable, the nature of her thoughts themselves are mature.
