Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is a slow, quiet, elegiac and dream-like book. It's a masterful distillation of storytelling and language. The story is simple - an introverted protagonist recounts her upbringing by various family members, ending with the care by her aunt, along with her younger sister. Throughout the book there’s a deep undertow of loss and transience. It is profoundly atmospheric and beautifully written.

Not at all what I expected. I was thinking this was about some poor woman taking care of a house. Hmm. Ok, it is. But, well, we're in Idaho, in a little podunk isolated town. And there aren't really any men around, or life structure, or, well, housekeeping. This a book of a free childhood surrounded by the American wilderness. There are elements of [A River Runs Through it]. And there are elements of a Huck Finn fantasy childhood. It's hard and confusing for these two girls, and beautiful. The prose is beautiful. Continually. Let loose by the girl's own freedom, the prose creates texture, breathes, sets pace, moves the reader. It's really special. There are darker underlying themes, and some questions the reader might want to press our show more poor author on, particularly about the ending. But mostly this book brings something to life. The girls and their oddball aunt live in here.

One of my best books of the year. It doesn't work for everyone, but when it does, it really has a lot to offer. So, I'm recommending it to you, dear patient review reader.

2025
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Housekeeping is such a strange book, I hardly know how to begin. Marilynne Robinson is world famous, especially after Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, but I didn’t much like Gilead so I was in no rush to read this first novel when in 2015 it arrived chez moi with the first release of Faber Modern Classics. (Which has since gone on to become a list of 21 titles). Housekeeping sat alone and lonely, abandoned in a box marked 2015, but I couldn’t quite make myself take it to the Op Shop which is the fate of books that publishers have sent me but which fail to spark my interest. I have no such compunctions with thrillers, crime novels, YA and weepy memoirs, but, well, I am in awe of the Robinson name, if not of her books.

Alone and show more lonely, abandoned in the care of someone not very interested in its fate… without knowing it, I had treated this book just like the characters in this novel! Lucille and Ruthie are two girls living in Fingerbone, a small village in rural Idaho. In what looks like a carefully planned suicide, they are abandoned first by their sole parent mother Helen to the care of their grandmother Sylvia, who has herself been abandoned by all three of her daughters. (Molly has gone off to be a missionary in China, Helen had lost contact when she married, and Sylvie is an eccentric wanderer). When grandmother dies, two elderly in-laws called Nona and Lily come to care for the girls but they are only too relieved to abandon the responsibility when long lost Aunt Sylvie turns up.

Men are conspicuous by their absence: Grandfather Edmund is killed in a train crash off the local bridge, unburied in the same lake in which Helen suicides. The girls have never known their father, and there is a mock father figure of the sheriff (who is clearly out of his depth in this dysfunctional situation) but he becomes the catalyst for the breakup of this fragile family.

I haven’t read many reviews but the ones I’ve seen go on about the religious aspects of this novel and its Calvinism. That’s not what I noticed so much. This is a novel of the 1980s, a time when many of us were questioning women’s roles and exploring how we could have equal rights and our freedom and manage the impact on our families, our homes, and our children. It seems to me that in amongst the religious stuff, Housekeeping is asking the same questions, trying to resolve a yearning for freedom and a rejection of the expectation that it’s women who pick up the pieces. The novel asks: what happens when women just don’t do what society expects them to do. What happens when they just don’t comprehend the predetermined roles?

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/04/14/housekeeping-by-marilynne-robinson/ show less

Housekeeping is a strange, difficult and beautiful novel. I am generally for the idea that form is content, and I think this axiom applies to Housekeeping. Ruth, our narrator, is a young girl whose intimate proximity to loss shapes her entire world, be it the mysterious, self-effacing nature of the town of Fingerbone or the family members who disappear near the very same lake that is explicitly likened to the biblical flood.

Most of the novel is told in the imperative mode ("imagine this" / "say that") and as such, only exist insofar that the reader agrees, along with Ruth, to the act of creation, or resurrection, as the novel would prefer. Ruth, a child whose life has been defined by death, can only comprehend her present through what show more is not - her act of resurrecting the dead through these imperatives, bespeak of a love that reveals only through monumental loss. Unlike her sister, Lucille, who'd rather stick with the conventional rituals of daily life to fend off despair, Ruth is inclined towards embracing death and her sorrow (she often dreams of being swallowed whole by the lake); understanding, maybe, that destruction is simply another act of creation. In the event of her mother's apparent suicide, Ruth imagines her sorrow, realising that that it is only in death that this sorrow can be felt, given a materiality that otherwise wouldn't exist. For Robinson, love is infinite; like God, it considers that whatever is lost, can be felt again in other ways. show less

Most first novels are somewhat autobiographical, and this is no exception. This tale of two orphan sisters who grow apart is set in the fictional Fingerbone, Idaho, which, Wikipedia informs me, is clearly modeled on Marilynne Robinson’s hometown, nestled on the shores of a glacial lake. Yet, while the locale, which gives the book its sense of place, is rooted in fact, the story is richly imaginative.

The two sisters are each other’s only stable relationship, as a changing cast of adults nominally care for them. The girls take this as a given until the younger of the two, Lucille, begins to sense its unconventionality and, without warning, moves in with a high school teacher.

The book is narrated by the older sister, Ruthie, who show more observes and records all, judging nothing. Instead, she is sustained by the trust that these seemingly random givens will all come together. “What are all the fragments for,” she asks, “if not to be knit up finally?” Later, she observes: “For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like a thing as a thing and its shadow. . . . And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole.”

The thing and its shadow: This polarity lies behind the book’s title, Housekeeping, paired with transience. As she follows her aunt Sylvie to abandon the family home to live on the road, she says: “Now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping.”

The expression Ruthie uses for this, “cast out to wander,” evokes the many Biblical allusions that course through the book: Cain and Abel (the first pair of siblings), Noah’s wife, Lot’s wife.

The book is written in rich, detailed prose, precise, not fussy, with an overall mood of melancholy and stoicism. It is an achingly beautiful book. show less

Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" already has two-hundred reviews of LibraryThing, so I'm not sure that there's anything of substance that I can really add to the discussion. I'll just say that text is freighted with heavy themes ranging from the artistic to the Biblical to the social but that reading it feels as easy and natural as breathing. Reading this one is like watching someone hit an impossibly long series of mind-bendingly complex half-court shots without breaking a sweat, seemingly barely aware that there's a basketball hoop somewhere out there in the distance. I often found myself so impressed by the prose that I had to leaf back to see what, exactly, I'd missed in terms of content. There was always something, so I'll show more probably have to reread this one soon.

I'm docking this half a star because despite the fact that I'm awed by Ms. Robinson's abilities as a writer, there's a tinge of a certain fantastical old-timiness here that bothers me. The book begins with the shocking and somewhat mysterious wreck of a passenger train. That's fine, but it signals a sort of nostalgic tone that continues throughout the text. Whatever Robinson is, she doesn't care to be much of a realist, and "Housekeeping" sometimes seems like a concerted effort to describe a beautiful but now almost entirely vanished version of American life. It's not for nothing that it's difficult to say exactly which decade of the twentieth century this novel is set in: I couldn't find a reference to single historical event that happened in the larger world that might offer a definitive clue. The Fingerbone, Washington that our narrator describes is a place so isolated that it seems not just geographically remote but also a bit adrift in time, too, the sort of place where the past lingers for as long as circumstances let it. For reasons specific to my own life experience, this isn't the sort of artistic preoccupation that draws me in, and I feel that, in the hands of an even marginally less gifted writer, the whole novel could have slid into solidly unspectacular whimsy. The author's talent is so prodigious that it never does, but there's still a bit of it hanging about, which keeps me from giving it the five stars its prose earns from its first page onwards. Recommended to everyone, but most of all to aspiring writers. It's hard not to think that Marilynne Robinson, who I'd somehow never read until now, set a new bar for good prose here, and one that everyone that follows will find hard to clear. In short, this one's so good that it's almost intimidating. show less

I previously read Marilynne Robinson's four Gilead novels, and only now this Housekeeping, written 25 years earlier, and that may be the wrong order. I definitely recognized the very controlled, refined writing style; Robinson is a first-class craftswoman who writes heavily charged sentences in a misleadingly poetic upmake. And I also recognized the emphasis on sensorial introspection: just as in the Gilead novels, the main character (here Ruth Foster) constantly alternates between registering her own sensory experiences and reflecting on what that does to her, and on the things she struggles with. Here Robinson approaches what the 19th century naturalists and symbolists did, by focusing on the threat posed by the environment in which show more this story takes place: the remote, chilly village of Fingerbone (the name alone), on a large lake in Idaho, connected with the outside world by a railway bridge that runs over the water. The tone is set right from the start: Ruth tells how her grandfather died when a train derailed on the bridge, ended up in the lake and was never recovered (and neither the bodies of the passengers within). And less than 20 pages later we read how her own mother committed suicide by driving her car off a cliff into the lake. The 'gothic flavor' of this novel is also emphasized further on, including in an unparalleled nocturnal scene in which the house is half flooded; darkness and obscurity clearly are recurring themes in Robinson.
But the main body of this novel describes how Ruth, together with her sister Lucille, subsequently came under the care of her aunt Sylvie, a confused, chaotic and very dreamy character. Robinson writes quite emphatically: “it was the beginning of Sylvie's housekeeping”, and in doing so she immediately provides us with a key to reading this novel. After all, it is not only about the struggle to keep the house (literally), but also about keeping it 'in order', and by extension also one's own life. Looking back on it, you notice that all the characters in this novel struggle with this: getting a grip on their own lives, curbing the inherent chaos of life and steering it in the right direction, and what you have to give up and sacrifice in doing so, and whether such an orderly life is actually the right choice. And all that aggravated by the struggle with loss, grief, isolation and loneliness, especially as a woman or a girl.
In other words, through Ruth Foster's coming-of-age story, Robinson opens up a reflection on what this life is all about and whether it makes sense to control it. To be clear: she does not give simple, obvious answers, but above all - through Ruth - asks the right questions. And thus there is a link with the Gilead novels, which essentially deal with the same theme, but with a clear, more religious - read Calvinist - slant, in which the question of good and evil, damnation and grace are more central. I think that Robinson definitely shows even more mastery in some of those Gilead novels, both stylistically and substantively, but with this 'Housekeeping' she already showed that her novels are among the best of what has been written in recent decades, worldwide. show less