Mourning Ruby (Paperback)

Rebecca, the novel's central figure, keenly feels the lack of family stories shaping her own life. Left as a baby in a shoebox outside an Italian restaurant, Rebecca has no real family and no family stories. Only as a young adult can Rebecca make a semblance of a family with her friend and roommate, Joe, an up-and-coming historian who creates a home with Rebecca. His love for her remains platonic, though, since Rebecca has adopted him as a brother rather than as a lover.

Rebecca later marries Joe's friend Adam and has a daughter, Ruby. Rebecca's connection to Ruby is even more dramatic than the traditional mother-child bond. At last, in Ruby, Rebecca has a family: "For the first time, I was tied to someone by blood." Rebecca's visceral connection to Ruby makes Ruby's sudden death, described in gut-wrenching detail, even more heartbreaking. I would defy anyone who has a child to read the account of Ruby's death without shedding a tear.

Torn apart by their misery in the wake of Ruby's death, Rebecca and Adam separate, both throwing themselves into their work. In the meantime, Joe is a continent away, fruitlessly trying to conduct historical research while living with a woman he does not love. Rebecca is haunted by dreams of Ruby in life and in death, and Adam, a neonatal specialist, seems to try to reverse the past with each premature baby whose life he saves.

As she tentatively makes her way back to Adam, Rebecca comes to rely on two stories that have parallels to her own. Her employer, the hotelier Mr. Damiano, tells Rebecca about his youth in his family's traveling circus. And, in a gesture that speaks volumes about his love for her, Joe breaks away from history and turns to fiction, composing a novel that imagines both his own absent father's past and the history of Rebecca's unknowable family tree. This "novel within a novel" comes near the end of MOURNING RUBY and helps Rebecca begin the process of healing her broken family ties.

This is a thoughtful, complex novel about the power of story and the importance of family. Readers who enjoy complex novels will enjoy this one, as will readers who relish poetic language. MOURNING RUBY is not an easy novel to read, either emotionally or intellectually, but readers who become absorbed by its web of stories will be richly rewarded.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

If you've ever read any of Dunmore's books, you'll know they are dark (THE SIEGE) and almost Gothic (A SPELL OF WINTER). I like dark books, but only if I can feel the characters' pain, only if I can connect with them emotionally. Unfortunately, I just couldn't connect with the narrator of MOURNING RUBY at all. It's not that there isn't a lot of pain and suffering in this book. There is. There might be a surfeit. It's not that it's not dark. It is. It revolves around the accidental death of small child, a near-fatal plane crash and suicide, so it couldn't possibly be anything by very dark, indeed.

And, Dunmore's writing is as good as ever. She has a tendency to give more description than I like, but in most of her books, this description works well. She's not an emotional writer, which works to her advantage. Since Dunmore writes about such dark and dramatic subjects, an extreme amount of emotionalism in her writing style would most definitely send her stories into the realm of the melodramatic.

The problems I encountered with this book were with the characterization of Rebecca and the novel's elaborate structure. I love intertwining narratives, but in MOURNING RUBY, Dunmore does more than intertwine narratives. She fills the book with so many flashbacks, letters, poems, dreams, stories-within-stories, etc. that the whole effect became choppy and I began to feel very emotionally detached from Rebecca and unable to feel her pain (which was intense...for her). I think MOURNING RUBY's convoluted structure actually greatly lessened its potential for emotional impact. Dunmore writes very literary books, but this time I think she's emphasized the intelligent aspects of her novel over its more emotional aspects, something I think was a mistake.

Rebecca, the protagonist of MOURNING RUBY is a woman unable to come to terms with a great tragedy in her life. Any terms. As her world crumbles around her, she goes to work for a mysterious man called Mr. Damiano. When Damiano sends Rebecca to New York, there ensues a fantasy-like sequence of events that seem quite unrelated to the rest of the book. They seem out of place. I think I know what Dunmore is trying to tell us, but I don't think she "told" us in the right (and most clear) way.

Then there's the character of Joe, an ex-lover of Rebecca's. Joe is attempting to write a book about the suicide of Stalin's wife. I didn't like this part of the book at all (which comprises most of the second half). While interesting, it just didn't seem to "fit."

Despite its choppy narrative (and it is choppy, Dunmore never quite manages to bring this one together), MOURNING RUBY is quite literary. There are many allusions to other books and other authors and unless you are very well-read (I mean very), you won't "get" all of them. I like literary allusions. I think they make a book more interesting, but in the case of MOURNING RUBY, I think Dunmore was guilty of overkill. There is simply too much.

Even though I couldn't feel empathy for Rebecca, I felt even less for Adam (Rebeca's husband), Joe and Damiano. In my opinion, Dunmore has never been very good at fully fleshing out her male characters. Usually, this doesn't matter so much because her books are carried by the female characters, but, with MOURNING RUBY, Dunmore seems to be exploring new ground and trying to break out of the claustrophobic "family" novels she is so good at writing. I think it was a big mistake. Dunmore has no equal when it comes to exploring dysfunctional family life, but in this experimental novel, she just isn't able to connect. I was disappointed. Oh, well, maybe next time, Dunmore will return to form.

I would recommend this book only to rabid Dunmore fans and to those who love experimental narratives so much, they can tolerate a very choppy and less than insightful book.