A little review of Little Way and some little remarks

I'm still not ready to write my full review of LWoRL. But I enjoyed this short review from Audrey.

I liked Ruthie but I was not crazy about her brother, the author. He brought too much of himself and his religion into his story.

I commented on this review positively. There was a negative reaction stating "Why would you criticize an author for bringing in his spirituality when it is very obvious, from reading the description of the book or the jacket/back cover, that this is going to be a major topic within the book?" So my reaction was to clarify why someone might be nonplussed with the manner in which religion is brought into the story.

This is the reaction most people I know have to the book. The story of Ruthie is basically used a delivery system for the author's own political ideologies and religious experiences. And while I don't doubt the possibility of real supernatural phenomena occurring to some people, all the people I know who feel compelled to trumpet them come off as pretty arrogant. That's my assessment when reading about his personal visitation by the Virgin Mary and the postmortem vision he has of his sister. The former doesn't add one thing to the story, the latter feels entirely contrived.

So Audrey agrees with one of my two main thoughts about how the book is flawed—it's too much about the author. This is my other main thought: I still don't think Rod Dreher understands his sister, Ruthie, and mischaracterizes her motives by superimposing his own belief system on hers. Maybe this will help explain what I mean....



Here's Dreher on Andrew Sullivan's Vimeo Channel. Try to ignore the weird visuals here, stifle your guffaws, and concentrate on what he is saying.

He starts off by saying that Ruthie had a bad attitude about Rod having left the old homestead to go live elsewhere. I think this misses the main point; I think Ruthie was irritated with her brother because of his endless vocal contrarianism. He told his father that he was a socialist, he sat inside watching VH1 instead of going out hunting craw-daddies, he read books and hung out with the town "liberals", and all evidence points toward his having no unspoken thought on any topic. This habit would unfortunately inexorably link his plans to bolt from his hometown with his hating everything about it, not a reasonable pursuit of his fortune or his education or whatever. After that, each call back home would probably be an announcement of some new, big-city experience—discovering some new food or restaurant, seeing someone famous, etc. This is commonly known as bragging which, when coupled with contrarianism, is not a good formula for winning friends and influencing people. Numerous examples in the book bear this out, believe me.

And we know what happened when he got the big jobs in the city. He went all contrarian at National Review and flipped out because people teased him about shopping at the farm market. He started all these arguments about how small towns were great and authentic and all the stuff that ended up in his first book. That's why it rings hollow when he claims he learned all these things from his dying sister; he had been going on about all this stuff for years.

It's ironic to me that one of Rod's oft-touted proofs for the greatness of his sister's "little way" is the big line at her wake. When discussing the topic of the many friends the Lemings had who helped them through Ruthie's illness with his wife, she points out to him that they have a lot of friends, too. But he retorts that they don't have a "deep bench". This struck me as a strange remark until I realized that it is a sports analogy. Could Rod's use of this analogy—probably subconscious—demonstrate that his relationship to his sister is still primarily a competitive one? Well, now that he's moved back, the line at his funeral better be at least as long as his sister's, dammit! (This is the point Kathleen is trying to make here, by the way.)

Like I said, I'm still not ready for a full review. For now I'll let Keith, Pik, Diane, Kathleen, SVS et al state more reactions to my thoughts below.