Rubyfruit Jungle

Rubyfruit Jungle is Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 debut novel and one of the genuine landmark American books of the 1970s, the kind whose influence is so well absorbed that newer readers can misread it as small. It is not small. Molly Bolt, the narrator, grows up adopted into a poor Florida family, knows she is queer in roughly third grade, and proceeds to refuse every social script handed to her by school, family, and college. The prose is plain and quick. The voice is the closest thing American literature has to a lesbian Holden Caulfield, except funnier and considerably less self-pitying.

Brown writes Molly’s sexuality matter-of-factly, which in 1973 was a structural risk: there is no closet drama, no plea for sympathy, no apology built into the sentences. Molly is good at school. She is good in bed. She is bad at hierarchy. She gets pushed out of NYU film school for being too out, hitchhikes across the country, and ends up working dead-end jobs while filming what amounts to a final-act statement of purpose. The episodic structure feels picaresque on purpose, like Huck Finn going through the post-Stonewall South.

Recommended for every reader of coming-of-age fiction, anyone teaching queer literature, and readers who want books like Rubyfruit Jungle in the lineage that runs from this novel through Stone Butch Blues, Eileen Myles, and Alison Bechdel. Five stars without qualification, and a book that still feels younger than its half-century in print.