Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
Deep in the heart of rural Wisconsin, 13-year old Ruth and her cousin Naomi are grappling with sin, penance and the dark tensions of adulthood. Living in a small community tightly bound by their Pentecostal faith, the two girls are like sisters, wrapped up in an unconditional devotion to one another – “she is mine,” Ruth often reflects. They are also bound together by a horrifying secret, and as they seek help through prayer, their faith becomes as suffocating as it is a comfort.
Sufficient Grace is the debut novel from Melbourne-based American writer Amy Espeseth, and won the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Narrated through the perspective of Ruth, the story stretches slowly over five months in a harsh winter, brought to life with an enchanting, almost folksy resonance. It comes as no surprise that Espeseth herself grew up in a Wisconsin fundamentalist community much like Ruth’s. This is an authentic rendering of a world created through intimate knowledge and a penchant for rich, earthy detail.
Much of the novel centres on simple, nostalgic images of rural life, from Ruth hunting in the forest with her father and brother, to the cousins playing in a barn stacked with hay, to Ruth sneaking chocolate caramels into church. Ruth’s thoughts are peppered with Biblical references and meditations on the teachings of Jesus; the scripture pervades every aspect of life. Amid this small town isolation and religious sheltering, Ruth and Naomi’s naiveté in dealing with the awful secret they share is understandable, though disturbing. It is the wilful blindness of the adults in the family, and their strident principles in regards to sin and retribution, that is more unsettling.
The wilderness setting plays a large role in the world of Sufficient Grace. The winter is violently cold, and the landscape can be both beautiful and brutal. When Ruth seeks solace, the farmland and forest are her source of comfort. The ice shimmering silently on the lake, the peeling black and white skin of a birch tree, the sap that bleeds slowly from its cracks, the deer that eat from an apple tree “like dark, silent ghosts” – all are reminders of God. At the same time, images of hunted animals, slaughtered deer strung up from the trees and blood dripping onto the snow create a potent feeling of dread. As the smallest details slowly build, innocence seems always quietly under threat.
Sufficient Grace is a slow burning novel with a dark intensity that simmers beneath largely silent images. As Ruth reflects, “People on the land live close to the beginnings and endings of life. Death ain’t a scary thing that creeps in now and again in the night… We are people that raise, hunt and butcher.”