Book review: What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez

By Simon Demetriou

In her acknowledgements, Claire Jimenez writes that ‘colonialism, racism, and femicide have been forces that shaped my reality and the way I am seen or not seen in this world’. This moving and revealing statement makes clear why the issues that run through her debut novel are so personal and relevant to its writer. And these issues, as well as those of child abuse, poverty, and the overwhelming grasp of patriarchy and capitalism which Jimenez also explores, are, of course, matters that are and ought to be of huge significance to every one of the book’s readers. So it’s sad as a reviewer to have to say that Jimenez’s statement also reveals the major basic flaw of What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez: it tries to do far too much in far too few words, and so ends up failing to do justice to all the important ideas upon which it touches.

The novel reflects upon the unexplained disappearance of 13-year-old Ruthy Ramirez from the perspectives of her mother and two sisters, 12 years on from when she vanished. Each of the three narratorial women represent an element of the immigrant experience as lived by a poor, Puerto-Rican family in Staten Island. Dolores, the girls’ mother, is the diminutive matriarch who embodies the violence and/of love that built and holds together a life in spite of poverty and racism. Jessica, the older sister, is the pretty girl dismissed in school who ends up building a loving and lasting family with the high-school boyfriend that everyone thought of as bad news. Nina, the youngest, is the academic over-achiever who feels like getting into a top university is a promise of escape from her restrictive background, only to be brought back down to earth post-graduation. All three women live with their respective senses of failure at not having kept Ruthy safe.

The plot’s galvanising point comes when Jessica thinks she spots a grown-up Ruthy on a reality TV show called Catfight, in which women scheme against and physically fight each other to win fame for the entertainment of an audience. Set against this close-to-the-bone satire on the degrading nature of entertainment and the tragic way in which women are presented with the worst possible models of womanhood, Dolores, Jessica and Nina determine to find and bring Ruthy home.

It’s a strong premise, and each of the characters has enough about them to sustain our interest and empathy. But the overload of issues and the fact that to address them in such a short novel requires a lot of telegraphed, uncontextualised comments that jar the reader from the story, stop the book from being as pleasurable or, sadly, as forceful as it might have been.