Inspired by the author’s own experience, Kate Riley’s debut novel depicts one woman’s life in the US chapter of an international Anabaptist sect. “The Brotherhood” is an insular and reactionary society founded by German emigrants. All property is held in common and centrally rationed in “a constantly recalibrating state of voluntary poverty”; collectivity is so rigidly enforced that even the family unit is considered a potential threat, with youngsters periodically rehoused in different families. Women (“sisters”) are assigned dowdy dresses in order to repress desire, and merely humming a tune is a guilty pleasure. This bleak way of life is rendered in a series of episodic dispatches, and the title character’s inner life is imparted in a free indirect third person as she grapples with doubt, shame and boredom.

Ruth is knock-kneed and clumsy, prone to malingering and fixated on language. She feels guilty if she rehashes a joke – because self-plagiarism might constitute “empty speech”, which is a sin. Having been raised in such an austere environment, her mind is blown on her first day at a public high school: “Enumerating the varieties of blue jeans made her think very seriously of infinity … The running list of exotic clothing she’d witnessed … ennobled her impulse to stare..” Time and again her thoughts circle back to the riddle of visual pleasure. “Beauty was an argument, but for what?” For Stendhal it meant the promise of happiness, and it connotes something similar here: life force, connection. Ruth is terribly lonely, plagued by a “constant lugubrious awareness of her own isolation”; “all she wanted was a friend who knew she was suffering but would not make her talk about it”. Instead, she marries a man she finds boring, has three children with him and sinks into depression. Decades pass in the blink of an eye. On a road trip for their 21st anniversary, we find her staring out from the passenger seat like a sullen teenager: “Every passing car was an opportunity to project pathos; she made eye contact and tried to look like a woman abducted.”

This is as much as we get by way of overarching narrative: not so much an arc as a flat line. In the most enjoyable plotless novels, the rhythms of inner life generate a momentum that substitutes for action. Here, Ruth’s diffident consciousness is a halting, intermittent presence; on the page as in life, she is overshadowed by her environment. Yet although the novel sometimes drags, Riley’s droll, sardonic narrative voice keeps the reader on board. She does a nice line in adverbial intensifiers: Ruth’s father is “deeply, magnetically pathetic”; a dog is “hypnotically dim”; a doctor is a “tiny and turbulently pink little man”. There are some memorable, elegantly economical descriptions: we encounter “a glossy, ursine sister”, “a cedar barn of a man”, a “squash-like cardinal”, and an “extremely vertical” visitor who “fell into handsome lines when quiet”. A group of women in an old black-and-white photograph look “like rats in kerchiefs”; an enthusiastic bather “hoisted up her skirt and slip and rushed into the water like a stung hen”.

Riley’s narrator is part wry anthropologist, part reluctant memoirist. Hers is very different from the kind of candour we have become accustomed to in contemporary fiction: it’s essentially withholding, and the emotional payoff is to be found not in the explicit excavation of trauma, but in bittersweet moments of levity and flights of whimsy. At one point, Ruth considers naming her daughter Idea: “It meant her favourite thing; it required only the slightest blunting of the mind to sound like it had been a little girl’s name all along. And it had occurred unbidden … like relief from hiccups and most angels.” (She doesn’t go through with it.) Literary culture has become so mired in therapeutic discourse that we’ve almost forgotten there are other, subtler ways to explore pain. Reticence, dissociation, quiet quitting: these are the unsung heroes of self-care, as Riley’s protagonist can vouch. “Ruth detached with ease; her life was one long, loud Velcro release from the world.”